OpenTTD 13.0 Released | Hacker News Reader

OpenTTD 13.0 Released

openttd.org

273 pointsjandeboevrie82 comments

OpenTTD is succesful not just because of the game itself good but it’s a truly free clone of the original. You don’t need the original game files, there are are replacements for the graphics, sound, and music.

imo that’s the “problem” with most of the open source game clones. They are just the barebones engine where you need the original files. Which of course doesn’t sound like a big ask especially if it’s an older game but still additional extra steps that makes the users job harder. And also makes the official distribution of the game impossible. See how OpenTTD is available in one package on Steam [0]

0, https://store.steampowered.com/app/1536610/OpenTTD/

OpenRCT2 seems to be doing pretty well regardless. I don't know how the player counts compare, but the OpenRCT2 community seems very active and the engine seems to have a good deal of care and polish put into it. They upgraded the file format a while ago, greatly expanding the capabilities of the game (increased ride limit, etc)

That's because it's a very mature clone. In the early versions, you of course needed original game files. And let's be honest, TTD with user gfx would still be TTD but something like Morrowind with user scenarios would be a different game.

> TTD with user gfx would still be TTD but something like Morrowind with user scenarios would be a different game.

Isn't that an apples-to-oranges comparison?

Both games have graphics; you could substitute user graphics with the same semiotics, for the same objects into Morrowind, while retaining the same game feel, just like they did in OpenTTD.

Morrowind does additionally have scripted scenario dialogue and descriptive text. But you're picturing the wrong thing if you're picturing a need to substitute entirely custom scenarios. Instead, picture "paraphrasing to avoid copyright." Plagiarism isn't illegal; only literally republishing the text of another copyrighted work is. A hypothetical open-source Morrowind project could convey the same scenario with merely different prose — the same as they could convery the same object assets with merely different artistic direction.

> Both games have graphics; you could substitute user graphics with the same semiotics, for the same objects into Morrowind, while retaining the same game feel, just like they did in OpenTTD.

And not only this, there are various graphical user mods to do just that, which someone bundles up into a modpack every few years

I don't think that requiring the original game files is a huge hurdle, unless the game is very esoteric and hard to find. There are many widely-used game engines that require the game files, such as ScummVM, Rollercoaster tycoon, etc.

The problem is more that many of the open source game engines aren't complete: features are missing, bugs not present in the original, etc.

These sort of projects tend to be pretty large and also fairly binary: either it's complete, useful, and playable, or it's not (yet) complete and it's unplayable and useless. There's a bit of grey area, but a lot less than many other projects. You can get away with "small implementation of X which slowly accrues features over time" with many projects, but a lot less so with reimplementation of games.

Eh, you are getting in wrong. There are lots of complete game engine reimplementations with most of the bugs fixed. They run far better than the original game engine on any new OS.

If any, it's good to have working WIP projects and reimplementations for games such as Resident Evil so they don't require emulation any more and thus they could run fast as hell on an Atom netbook.

> There are lots of complete game engine reimplementations with most of the bugs fixed. They run far better than the original game engine on any new OS.

I never said that's not the case.

> These sort of projects tend to be pretty large and also fairly binary: either it's complete, useful, and playable, or it's not (yet) complete and it's unplayable and useless.

Everything is "binary" if you choose an arbitrary cutoff point.

Your example of ScummVM is a bad one: in ScummVM there are games that show nothing but a title screen, games where about half of the game works, games that are completeable but are lacking some aspect (e.g. music/sound effects/animations), games that are perfectly playable and completeable, and even games that have improvements upon the original games. The whole spectrum is present in ScummVM's engines at almost any point in time, as there are new engines constantly being added and others perfected. A game that's completeable but lacks music, for example, is certainly not "useless".

The fact that many of these engines are not (yet) complete is certainly not exclusive to game reimplementations. There's hardly any open-source project or game that declares itself "complete"

> I don't think that requiring the original game files is a huge hurdle

It can be, because unless the game comes with all its own assets, it can't be a friction-free install for the end-users.

You can't expect to get the success of OpenTTD if you're unable to put the game on steam, and you cannot put it on steam if it won't run without the original game (which won't be on steam).

There other question of successfully cloning a game is "Will we ever be able to replace the requirement of needing the original game's files?"

With 2D games the answer is almost always "Yes, we can sooner or later have replacement 2D assets".

With 3D games you can forget about it; the effort and skill level is too high for volunteers to make it happen.

> With 2D games the answer is almost always "Yes, we can sooner or later have replacement 2D assets".

This is really not true for most 2D games. For something like OpenTDD where the art is mostly functional and replacting it will still give you about the same experience as TDD, sure. For something like a Point & Click adventure? Nah, the art and scripting is the game, you might as well create a completely new game at that point. The distinction really has nothing to do with 2D vs. 3D.

That just means that you need twice the programing effort. Part one is a game play engine, part two is a game content creator engine. Then of course your need to attract people who want to create a game but are not programmers. Of course to create a game of that type needs some programming skills, but the level is - or should be - a lot less than writing the engine.

A good game engine with good tools can save users who want to write that type of game a lot of effort. You shouldn't have to write collision detection algorithms to give the user a sword/gun/magic spell.

I honestly don't see a point to creating "replacement 2D assets" for old LucasArts and Sierra adventure games. As far as I know, every single one of those classic adventure games runs great inside SCUMMVM. So why not just buy any of the games you want to play (from GOG) and run it through SCUMMVM? I bought Quest for Glory I-V for like $10. Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis is $5.

Looks like some of the original Monkey Island games were taken off the site and replaced with remakes, much to fans' dismay. I suppose there are other ways of tracking down the originals.

> I suppose there are other ways of tracking down the originals.

Har, har!

> some of the original Monkey Island games were taken off the site and replaced with remakes

MI and MI2, replaced with a 'Special Edition' which does include 'classic mode'.

Industry is not ready for leasing the assets to the end-users. Yet, I hope.

> For something like OpenTDD where the art is mostly functional and replacting it will still give you about the same experience as TDD, sure. For something like a Point & Click adventure?

I think the reason for this is something you haven't considered: OpenTTD is extremely repayable, long-term fans of this game put thousands of hours into it. An old Point & Click adventure? Long-term fans might replay the game a few times every few years, but I don't think those sort of games will ever inspire the amount of invested effort that OpenTTD can.

Or consider Morrowind, closer to a Point & Click in concept (the art and scripting is a big part of the draw), but known to be a huge time sink that people can easily put thousands of hours into. And again, you see a very high level of investment from the community. Lots of total graphics replacement mods, mods that add huge new levels dwarfing the original game, etc.

> With 3D games you can forget about it; the effort and skill level is too high for volunteers to make it happen.

Not necessarily true. I can churn out game-ready 3D assets pretty quickly and I can't draw anything 2D at all. There's a lot of tools for 3D modelling and texturing that can provide some sort of automation to a degree (e.g. Houdini or even Blender's geometry nodes for procedural stuff [landscapes, mechanical stuff], Substance Designer for procedural materials, Mixamo for premade animations for virtually any scenario that you can simply attach to your models etc.). AFAIK there's nothing like that for 2D.

2D, while maybe fun to draw on a piece of paper, requires a lot of painful manual labor when working with games, e.g. you need to draw all animation frames separately instead of simply keyframing some skeleton as in 3D. Just imagine the process of changing a simple thing like a piece of clothing on a character.

The Steam release of openttd is incredibly late in the life of the project. I don't know how much it affected the users, but it was certainly well known and established before it was on Steam

OpenTTD was well known and popular for it's genre. Placing it on Steam, GoG and Microsoft Store was more about just making it more accessible and convenient for players to download and update, as users were already providing simple installs for the various Linux distributions, Docker, Flatpack etc.

    These sort of projects tend to be pretty large and also fairly binary: either it's complete, useful, and playable, or it's not (yet) complete and it's unplayable and useless. There's a bit of grey area, but a lot less than many other projects.

Kinda hard disagree there, I guess. I’m following both Dethrace which is source port of Carmageddon, and OpenGothic2 which is source port of Gothic 2. And both of those projects were massive fun to play before even reaching feature parity. You just need to get your project to the point where game can be completed and there is no crash every 5 minutes.

"Full feature parity" is probably a bit too much, yeah, but to get to a "game can be completed" stage often requires a lot of effort, and it's hard (not impossible, just hard) to attract a community before you get to this stage.

Getting to this stage is often the biggest hurdle for these projects, not the lack of free resources.

> I don't think that requiring the original game files is a huge hurdle, unless the game is very esoteric and hard to find. There are many widely-used game engines that require the game files, such as ScummVM, Rollercoaster tycoon, etc.

But then the question is: Why not use the original game with ScummVM, DosBox or a VM (with whatever OS necessary)?

Running a VM is hard-ish, and in a reimplementation will usually run better on modern systems, may have additional features, support for things like modern resolutions, bugfixes, etc.

That's not an OSS game clone, but a game engine reimplementation.

Clones would be Bombermaan, Secret Maryo Chronicles, Freeciv, Pangzero...

As a fascinatingly rare case, OpenRA has the actual original assets a very convenient download away ("License and Game Assets" text[0]) right in the UI when you start it, thanks to an interesting license twist I did not know about[1].

(IIIRC minus the music and cutscenes, which you can import from the original games)

> The OpenRA game engine is free software released under the GPL3 license. The OpenRA mods require files from the original games, which are used under the license granted by the C&C Franchise Modding Guidelines. These files are not covered by the OpenRA license, and you will be prompted to download or copy them the first time you run a mod.

> EA has not endorsed and does not support this product.

[0]: https://www.openra.net/download/

[1]: https://www.ea.com/games/command-and-conquer/command-and-con...

While I appreciate the free assets, it's hard to beat the origin TTD soundtrack. Those were even recorded with real instruments for a rerelease[1], which turned out to be awesome, but I like the original midi one as well.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OuJy9oCdUns

Wow, this is great!

I usually have this on repeat while I work. So good!

Yeah, I also constantly catch myself mindlessly humming some of the original midi songs while doing household chores etc.

I'm constantly in one phase or another of a variation of this loop:

    1) Play OpenTTD as a transportation game.
    2) Get obsessed with the signalling possibilities.
    3) Use the logic train mod to build basic logic gates & memory.
    4) Start to build a general-purpose computer within OpenTTD.
    5) Consider deeply how to design a minimal instruction set for such a train-based computer.
    6) Begin development on an assembler, linker, and compiler for a custom instruction set
       (definitely not self-hosted, but wouldn't that be fun???)
    7) Get sidetracked because the project has grown too large.
    8) Pick up OpenTTD and play it as a transportation game.

I mostly do the first one

For me it’s all about making the biggest junctions possible with as high throughput as possible. There’s a lot of similarities with software engineering and concurrency here.

I always thought that when people were designing actual CPUs in games like openttd or factorio, they actually used tools to generate save games rather than do everything by hand? Is that not true?

it's not uncommon to see some computational elements in games on public servers, but building a real stored-program computer requires at least the clipboard patch if not direct savegame manipulation. (or incredible patience, i suppose)

OpenTTD is one of the rare remakes of a classic game that has succeeded in significantly improving upon the original. Though I stay away from playing it because it's so addictive.

Choo-choo!

I usually binge it for a few hours then don't touch it again for years.

I vividly remember playing the trial version over and over as a little kid on my first computer, a PentiumI system. With no internet and no access to any computer stores that carried the game, the game was only a memory in my teens.

But then I got Internet access, and some time later discovered OpenTTD. I started with point-to-point rail connections and escalated from there, into complex block-based any-to-any rail networks with train grouping and feeder systems via road and waterway. Then I discovered the FIRS mod and the networks got so complex I had to start inserting comments via the in-game signpost functionality to keep myself from trying to apply disproven "fixes" to certain hotspots.

And it even compiles and runs on my OpenPOWER ppc64le system!

Can't wait to start a new map, I haven't found enough time for the game the last couple of years...

I tried it because I loved the original and remember playing it for hours (and keeping the low difficulty game run over night to get a lot of money).

I think the controls haven't aged very well. Compared to modern games laying tracks is so damn complicated. I get that you can build complex layouts without the "helping game" get in your way but I just couldn't get into it anymore.

On the one hand that is true, but on the other OpenTTD _has_ made improvements to the controls. They are subtle, and very much in the spirit of the original game, but they are there.

The autorail tool (A, or the fifth button with the cross icon) is the one you want for a click and drag experience, and the most popular modpack, jgrpp, adds a "polyline" patch which lets the autorail tool also add in bends as needed. I suspect that patch will get merged eventually

Considering OpenTTD has already made a change to hid the classic rail signals by default in favor of path signals (I'm really not on board with this change, but regardless), I think it would probably be justified for them to hide the non-auto tools by default as well. Autorail is really the one most people should be using by default, but the game UI makes it too easy for new players to use the manual rail tools instead.

I like the 2.5D RTS-like TTD rail laying, I find the newer Locomotion "RollerCoaster Tycoon" style track laying disturbing.

OpenTTD Game Mechanics - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32698851 - Sept 2022 (14 comments)

OpenTTD 12.0-RC1 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28654753 - Sept 2021 (62 comments)

OpenTTD 1.11 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26660154 - April 2021 (58 comments)

OpenTTD 1.10 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22772536 - April 2020 (114 comments)

OpenTTD Compiled to WebAssembly - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19538715 - March 2019 (88 comments)

OpenTTD 1.8.0-RC1 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16725375 - March 2018 (28 comments)

>Multi-track level crossings to keep road vehicles from stopping in the middle of the crossing.

How are you to run over your competitors if they don't stop in the middle of the crossing?

> Feature: Hotkey to honk a vehicle's horn (#10110)

Gamechanger! I love this game, this and factorio are like crack to me.

It's the year 2237 and OpenTTD is still in active development. :D

I love this game and I'm amazed at the amount of time and love spent on improving this gem.

The biggest change of OpenTTD was in 2007 when it became full free software because the time when they released full free the assets (sounds, sprites, music...).

I hope that OpenRCT2 (and OpenLoco) are near to this point.

The addition of a horn button makes it a very worthwhile upgrade.

I love the game and have put hundreds of hours in over the years but I just wish there was an option to make depots realistically sized.

I kind of agree, but that would make depots the size of largest cities on the map. As with small ones - that sometimes happens with small towns with railway junctions, in real life.

Cities and towns are out of scale in the game, anyway, compared to the rail systems.

Scale always seems to be off in city builder games (a different but related genre, I suppose). Small roads that are too wide. Stadiums and even large power plants that are barely larger than condominiums. These structures should dominate the surrounding landscape, and I think a city sim would be better if it modeled it more accurately.

Cities: Skylines is not too bad in that regard. The core game has some really silly assets (like the international airport which feels big until you realize that the runways are about ¼ or less of the proper size, and the concourse and terminals are scaled down to match), but for a lot of things you can build them to the proper scale with a little creative thinking, a DLC (like the airports DLC), or mods (get one of the parking lot mods so that you can put 10k parking spots around your realistically–sized stadium, for example).

Cities skyline is about redoing the urban planning mistakes of the last century. And it’s fun.

Agreed! With just a little practice, building the perfect highway interchange with all of its flyovers everything is really a lot of fun. You can really see why cities like to build those perfect 6–level urban stack interchanges with access roads.

Yeah - the DLC really helps, where for instance a University changes from being a tiny building just a bit larger than a high school, to an entire campus with student accommodation, lecture halls, gyms, etc.

I think it's specifically the techniques you need to use to optimise depots that I find frustrating. Using double depots or staggering them on raised ground for maximum throughput.

It just feels like depots should be more like stations (build them in tiles, a depot long enough to contain a train services it quicker, trains can pass through or turn around) - I think it'd add loads to the game. Being able to build big roro depots near main lines or have smaller terminus ones with a few bays for lower traffic routes.

Edit: here's a 2007 thread on the forums covering the idea https://www.tt-forums.net/viewtopic.php?t=30346

If you play with the JGR Patch Pack, there is a patch for drive-thru depots, which lets you place depots back-to-back, with each end open, and a train will drive in one side, service, and then drive out the other. It looks a little janky with the default depot graphics, but if you use a track set with full-tile depots, it looks wonderfully accurate, and you can make them as many tiles long as you need.

Oooh thanks for the tip. I'll definitely investigate!

you can make a depot "extension" with station tiles, just for the looks

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-umeHUv1RoeQ/VKkmTK8Cx-I/AAAAAAAAGK...

I always remember seeing like a 12-carraige train just disappear into the single tile depot :) Fond memories :)

First played TTD in 1995, still playing OpenTTD today.

Some years ago I tried it and found that it is quite easy to reach a state where there is too much clashflow, post that there isn't much of a further challenge? Is that still the case?

Railroad tycoon 3 for example had sort of dynamic elements that influence gameplay like the historical drop in rail passenger traffic in 20th century, and important choice of diesel vs electric, and of letting other companies run trains on your tracks etc? Does OpenTTD presently offer similar challenges?

That was the case in the original Transport Tycoon Deluxe, if memory serves right. Getting cash positive isn't the real challenge, the challenge is growing faster than the competition. Which is a lot more fun if you can play against humans rather than AI. Playing without rival companies is more of a sandbox than anything, where you have to make your own challenges and goals. Can you survive with only buses? Only boats? Make the most optimal rail network? etc. Once you have a grasp of how income is calculated, there are lots of exploits you can do as well to make money practically infinite.

This was also the case for Chris Sawyer's later games too - Roller Coaster Tycoon 1 and 2 challenged you not just with having a cash positive park, but with meeting goals under a time limit or with other restrictions. It is something of a cursed problem in game design for sure - if you make the basic act of surviving too hard, you limit player expression and fun; if you make it too easy, you can just as well remove the money system entirely. I would say the proper balance is one where you can run out of cash, but aren't likely to if you just apply a modicum of business sense. Which is how both TTD and RCT play. SimCity is another example of that. The games are most fun when your own creative ideas have enough breathing room to grow.

Railroad Tycoon 3 ( and 2) achieved a sort of good level of challenge I think. It also seperated personal funds from company funds and had challenges like growing one's personal networth to a certain figure, which involved playing the market. Its business simulation aspects seems well fleshed out.

I used to try to run my company to the ground, buy all the shares for dirt cheap and make it profitable again to become filthy rich. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it backfired really bad, but a lot of fun was had.

Stop playing Richie Rich.

Set scarce resources, high taxes, multiple competitors, realistic breakdowns... Yes, you still can make tons of money just running a coal train for 200-500 squares, but it would take you a long time to afford this.

Also, TT, in all it's incarnations, is more a sandbox type game than a challenge one. You set the rules, you play by those rules. Or break them fo giggles and profit. Or make bus only empire. Or terraform everything to NeoMegaVenice and run only ships. Or..

It's still the same, I enjoy the system building more than anything. I did see a stream that inspired me. DDRJake did one where he started out with a small number of cities in a very large map, so that to expand he had to build the cities as well. He had a couple of sub-conditions:

1. all cities need to be connected to each others (for this to be interesting you also need to turn on that passengers can have destinations farther away than just next town), and 2. industries that spawn too far away from a town must be destroyed (because industry spawns randomly across the map and then is coupled to a town)

I don't know if that would be enough for you, but definitely puts an extra strain on the economy, but in the end, I mostly enjoy trying to handle the pax stuff.

The original AI for OpenTTD is mediocre. There are many options for alternative Computer player AI that are quite a bit more intelligent, efficient, and cut-throat. Try downloading one of their NewGRFs and trying them out

> Some years ago I tried it and found that it is quite easy to reach a state where there is too much clashflow, post that there isn't much of a further challenge? Is that still the case?

Yes, it's reasonably easy to generate huge ammounts of positive cashflow, but if you find that bad, you can just give your money to other players in multiplayer, raise and lower sea, or bribe a random town authority until enough money vanishes.

> the historical drop in rail passenger traffic in 20th century

This happens in the OpenTTD too if you start offering non-rail passenger transit.

> important choice of diesel vs electric

You can enable this in OpenTTD options, but it's mostly a very easy drag-select to simply update your entire rail grid to catenary powered ones.

The most important rail infrastructure decisions are between conventional/electrified rails, monorail and maglev, that requires actually replacing all your rails/stations/depots/trains infrastructure in one go.

> and of letting other companies run trains on your tracks etc?

Under normal settings, tracks are unfortunately too cheap to lay, you can just lay your own parallel set of competing tracks while leveling half of the land in the process.

Another possibility is multiplayer, with several players on the same game company.

> Some years ago I tried it and found that it is quite easy to reach a state where there is too much clashflow, post that there isn't much of a further challenge? Is that still the case?

Making cash was never the goal, it was a means to the end. The original goal is to score more points than the other players and make it to the top of the leaderboard in the year 2050. But there's so many add-ons anymore than almost nobody plays that way. It's either sandbox, build pretty looking virtual model railroads, or just make up your own rules. Many players now use multiplayer to either build massive and efficient networks (co-op style), or to build fantastic model worlds (cooperative play). The latter is often achieved using the JGR Patch Pack with the Infrastructure Sharing patch activated. You also have communities such as n-ice and CityMania where the community has a collective online scoreboard and run customized contests using game scripts and AIs.

In addition to the other suggestions, OpenTTD has optional inflation that you can turn on to help rebalance the economics. It ramps up the cost of everything as your world ages.

While looking for a decent AI, I found 'rondje rond de kerk'.

https://www.tt-forums.net/viewtopic.php?f=65&t=39756

Basically, it's the paperclip maximizer of openttd AI: Every nasty trick in the book is allowed, e.g. selling busses with the people still inside.

I never dared playing against it, but was laughing aloud while reading its description.

I'm still playing from time to time an OpenTTD game I started more than 10 years ago, maybe even 15 years ago: the earliest save I still have is from 2009 but it was already ~300 years into the game. Started in year 1900 I think; now is year 4100 and some.

After having not played since owning the original game 25+ years ago, I installed OpenTTD for the first time a couple days ago. Even with community-created graphics and sounds it looks and feels exactly like the original!

I'm temporarily weary of big triple-A open world games, so TTD is just what I need right now.

I wonder if they fixed the exploit that allows you to basically kill the AI. The AI players will run their vehicles on a certain route and if you just run a short train track across the road and stop an engine in the crossing, their vehicles will just stack up there and never reroute.

In case it isn’t widely known, you can also get OpenTTD on mobile. Though it isn’t the easiest to play that way.

Or, run a short track butting up to the end of their track, buy the cheapest locomotive and park it at the end. Wait for the inevitable crash of locomotives.

Repeat, and watch the AI's company value crater. Buy them for $1

Even better: Make the train stop right before lights turn red. With careful timing you can wreck the car with no harm to the train.

I don't remember trains ever suffering anything from (full speed or not) road vehicle collisions.

The portable version has been updated as well: https://portableapps.com/news/2023-02-06--openttd-portable-1...

Loved this game back in the late 90s. Prior that, Sim City. Good times.

I guess this game requires the same treatment dwarf fortress received: a better UI, some tutorial maybe.

Id say compared to Dwarf Fortress, OpenTTD is a much easier to understand game. It's mouse driven (though there are hotkeys) and you can generally figure out how to play the game in about 20 minutes without reading a tutorial.

> and you can generally figure out how to play the game in about 20 minutes without reading a tutorial.

This is true but reading the manual really helps and makes the game much better. For instance, I think it's probably hard for a new player to intuitively guess that control-clicking when cloning a train will create shared orders. But shared orders are really good and new players would benefit from learning them as soon as possible.

It's completely moddable, and some of the most popular mods add better graphics.

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