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OpenTTD

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434 pointssimonebrunozzi95 comments

> OpenTTD turns 20 this year, and to celebrate we are preparing for one of our largest ever releases.

so far this is the first big feature announced: https://www.openttd.org/news/2024/02/10/unbunching (for buses, trucks, road vehicles)

Changelog for version 14 beta, with full list of changes: https://cdn.openttd.org/openttd-releases/14.0-beta1/changelo...

The numbers refer to pull requests and these have more details; e.g. description of the infinite money mode: https://github.com/OpenTTD/OpenTTD/pull/11902

I was never excellent at this game, but used to play it and listen to podcasts, etc.

One of my favourite things to do was play single player against a particular AI that would spam out hundreds of buses. It would always quickly take the lead, so I'd set up my own bus routes, then order all my buses to stop in the middle of the road at once.

This would lead to massive gridlock, effectively denying the AI profit while its operating costs dragged it to bankruptcy. When it went bust, I'd buy out the company, then allow my (now) hundreds of buses to move again!

it's a fantastic game, but in terms of making money it's too easy!

you build a small service that gets you enough capital to build a line for e.g. oil from one end of the map to the other

that's it, then you can treat the entire game as a giant sandbox (which is the best bit)

This is true but if you add in some game scripts or download specific scenarios and add in the FIRS resource packs (with much more complicated supply chains) it can be quite challenging.

My personal favorite was doing 5min city builder blitz online. Wasn’t ever very good but would keep me occupied for hours on end!

the quadratic infrastructure cost makes it a bit more challenging too

I always played it as a meta-game: you can control transportation, but my real goal was to increase city population and ultimately build a single large metroplex.

ya exactly. i liked to treat this whole genre as gardening. simcity is more constrained gardening; you dig your plots and watch stuff grow. transport tycoon is more like guerilla gardening; fundamentally you're in the wilderness, but with the right interventions - irrigation here, a latticework there - you in time dramatically transform the landscape

Also the economy doesn't make much sense factories are victim of the distance of travel pricing so will overpay coal from the other side of the map even if they have one just on their doorstep railroad tycoon delux did price maps much better and nothing compares to industry giant.

> will overpay coal from the other side of the map even if they have one just on their doorstep

Aye. It can be very profitable if you find a pair of matching resource sources and sinks a nice distance (given current technology available) between them – take coal from region 1 to a power station in region 2, and pickup more coal over there and pull it back to region 1, and of course repeat. This way your trains have cargo in both directions so make more profit than if they return all the way back empty. It makes more sense for passengers, who may have reasons to travel long distance (holidays, long commutes, …) no matter what is on their doorstep.

Back when we played the original game, there was a bug that leads to underflow in the money. You had to build a tunnel that spanned the entire width of the map, which would cost just more than 2 billion dollars, underflowing and giving you 2 billion instead. Afterwards, the game was a pure sandbox, and that's the only way I played it as a kid.

Still one of the best games ever!

Omg I remember discovering that bug.

I have a friend who used to do that and dominate the rest of us, but he also had to insist that we play with the "local authorities" disabled -- you know the people who get tired of you flattening a neighbourhood to fit in a high-profit oil line and prevent you from going on.

Are you saying this strategy is viable also with local authorities enabled?

1. On the scale of "the whole map", going around a city isn't that much of a detour. You only need local authority permission for stations or bulldozing city buildings/roads, so build stations first the rail around obstacles.

2. Forestation projects are an easy way to build local authority rep. There's also a floor to how low rep can go, so if you need to bulldoze a forest to make room for your reforestation project, that still works out

It's a fantastic game to play co-operatively but also competitively with a couple of your friends. Finding silly ways to sabotage your friends and see the reactions is quite fun. And then once you get tired of that or figure out a truce its nice to try and work towards a common goal.

It seems more realistic.

Cool, it's not quite JGR auto separation, but it is an improvement. Now if we just get day length and all the fancy train grouping/naming features (or even better, lines as a first class concept), then that would be great for my experience when I don't want to walk friends through installing JGR

Related: I recently made OpenTTDLab https://github.com/michalc/OpenTTDLab that can run OpenTTD headlessly from Python and extract data from its savegames in a hopefully fairly straightforward way.

(Very recently posted on ShowHN, so maybe this is cheeky…)

Really cool! I assume you built this to test out different AIs for the game, is that right? What other uses does it have?

Short answer: yes, exactly

Long answer: trying to make it much easier to do simulation-based research using OpenTTD, and for any results found to be as reproducible as possible. There have been a few papers/dissertations that use OpenTTD, but it's tricky to do exactly what the authors did, or even in a few cases I suspect it was hard for them to repeat their own experiments or extract results from them. OpenTTDLab seeks to make these easier.

And, such research seems to often (/always?) use AIs, so that's the focus.

I also would like to be able to train an AI in some automated(/formal?) way, and maybe use OpenTTD to investigate something a bit more... supply-chain-y, but that's a work in progress (I've not even written an AI yet!)

But also a bit of a less formal "just run an AI/some AIs over some seeds and see" is also very much a use case. Am trying to strike that balance between something quite... exploratory, but still reproducible.

I thought it was time I got off my... and starting making an AI (https://github.com/michalc/SupplyChainLabAI - but it does nothing but log a debug message repeatedly at this point, I feel I have a long journey...)

But it makes me realise there is another use case for OpenTTDLab that I don't think I considered: regression tests for OpenTTD AIs?

Edit: And it has been mentioned to me separately that maybe it could be used as part of regression tests of OpenTTD itself https://github.com/OpenTTD/OpenTTD/discussions/11863#discuss...

I loved OpenTTD (and Transport Tycoon before that), but since I experienced bot building and copy-paste in Factorio and Mindustry, I can't go back to manually place each rail. The auto-rail feature is nice, as is the one where it lets you to semaphore up a straight line with a single mouse drag, but building each rail junction by hand... I just can't find it in me anymore. It feels like typing out boilerplate code by hand.

Hey, I'll preface this by saying I've never played or contributed to OpenTTD, but I was a little fascinated by your comment. I always wonder when I see feature requests like this, where are the limits that have stopped something like this being added in the past?

Are there technical or historical limitations in OpenTTD that you can see from a player that makes it obvious no simple-fix would work without a full overhaul of certain systems?

From an outsider, and at the risk of sounding like a project manager right before receiving a whole range of "Sure, but..." answers, it seems like if they already have a system for drawing straight lines, can't it automatically draw a junction when those two lines meet?

Also, not to knock those "Sure, but..." answers, there is usually a whole lot of information in the but.

Surely no limits, cause computer opponents build proper railways most of the times. I also wish there was an option for "build railway through here-ish, suggest budget classes for landscaping".

OpenTTD is a cool game, but you quickly hit all the realistic walls: micromanagement, weak accounting and planning, scale-related issues. As a former ERP guy, it drives me nuts sometimes. Dammit, put all the data into a database, so I can write a proper resource planning system mod with all sorts of reports and automatic orders!

I agree, I love the game, but the game design is very dated. This is the thing about old games, it's not just that the graphics get old, but the UX, and the game design itself also gets outdated.

I think a large element of it is that... these games were not necessarily intended for an adult audience.

I remember picking up Transport Tycoon on the coverdisc of some PC magazine. I was in grade school, it was fun. Lots of clicky intricate detail that a child's mind used to narrow horizons could obsess over and learn to minmax. When you came home from school and your world was the inside of your house a game like that seemed like the universe, you obsessed over it because _it's what there was._

Then you... grow up and go outside. Your world expands to a fantastically large size and you move on from small toys. There's just... so much more out there.

Sorry to put it so bluntly. (And I have this game installed and fire it up maybe once a year for a bit of nostalgia.)

The older generation always had railroad simulators, for the nerdier grandpas out there who really wanted to replicate the railroad signaling systems from the late 1800s or whatever age they were simulating. It just cost real $$$ 50 years ago, since each toy-train and toy-track would have had to have been actually made out of plastic.

OpenTTD is easier than that, but harder than most games. Its a better balance (less to learn) than hobby-railroad hobby... cheaper... but still with the complex paths and simulated traffic needed to build a game off of.

Its a toy. Plenty of old folks have toys, and IMO it seems like the healthier retired folks I know of are those who continue to play with toys into old age. It could be a selection bias thing, but you have to keep the mind active in the retirement years.

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It could be a weird generational gap thing, wherein older folks play with expensive toy sets (ex: lots and lots of rails) in their basements. But younger folk today would have a toy-like video game (like OpenTTD, Minecraft, etc. etc.) instead.

I don't think its appropriate to ever "grow out" of toys. I think that... maybe... you run out of time to play with toys during the busier stages of your life.

Unlike a "game" where there's a set purpose and therefore a set limit to the complexity... a "toy" game (Rollercoaster Tycoon, OpenTTD, Factorio, etc. etc.) are designed to instead have the players reach complexity levels above-and-beyond what the designers dreamed of.

Minecraft is a funny case, because in alpha and beta it was really big on Reddit, the audience was clearly people in their 20s and 30s. The YouTubers making videos about it were adults.

Some time after 1.0 it exploded in popularity, especially with younger kids, and it's now almost universally seen as a kids' game. But it's still the same game; if anything it's become more complex.

> Minecraft is a funny case, because in alpha and beta it was really big on Reddit

Reddit in those days was a much smaller place than it is now and a lot of the users were functionally odd, a huge amount of the discussions revolved around 'how to behave in public' and 'how to navigate normal social interactions' and 'how to cope with social anxiety' - I'm not trying to judge because I was a user too, but the average reddit user around that time - and especially a reddit minecraft fan - could politely be described as a manchild.

And minecraft Youtube is still a very weird place.

I'm 50 this year, and I've been playing Minecraft since beta 1.0 or so.

I recently started playing again, and boy has the game changed in the last 5 years or so. The caves and cliffs update made exploring wonderful.

Your comment made me look this up, and it turns out that the copy-paste and blueprint functionality goes against the core ideas the original OpenTTD devs have. So it principle, not a technicality.

I have found an OpenTTD fork though, CityMania, which has several quality of life patches, including a copy-paste tool. I have just tested it and it works, kind of, but it doesn't copy terrain elevation, so junctions have to be made with bridges, instead of tunnels, to be able to be automatically replicated.

https://citymania.org/downloads

This is why push&shove routing was so important addition to Kicad :) Once you are exposed to it once you never want to go back.

"Kicad push-and-shove routing, 2nd attempt" - Tom W Sep 18, 2013 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zxHDAHpR5Ls

Ooh, it looks really slick. Indeed, this is a far cry from the TTD way of placing each rail by hand.

I’ve enjoyed many hours of this game in the past but like all such games in this genre, I end up wanting to be challenged and there’s just nothing challenging in the game. Your company will grow and grow without much effort at all.

Simulator games are among my favourites, but totally agree that when I play Factorio, I often quit because I can't help but think "this itch can equally be scratched by working on the programming side-project you had in mind"

That’s horribly depressing and exactly how I feel.

Why depressing?

I'm not sure, but you say it like a bad thing, there is a weird few studies who've explored the game v work mentality before, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6829166/ Not necessarily negative, but needs to be considered as a tool not a replacement.

Wherever inspiration for a bit of "I need to scratch this itch" come from, personally I am the same and I love it.

EDIT : Also, Factorio is top.

You're absolutely right!

I'm trying to beat out the "not productive = waste of time" mentality out of myself, and I'm getting much better about it! But Factorio somehow always brings it out of me :P

A reminder to spend a goodly amount of your time on this Earth just basking in its pleasures, large and small, "productive" or otherwise.

You have more will power than I. I often think I should quit to do something more practically useful, but "I'll just do ... first" kicks in and I later feel crap for having not progressed the other things.

This is why I can't even get started. "If I'm going to be creative, why not actually create?"

Of course creativity's also a subject I pressure and criticize myself about, whereas with a game you may not hold yourself to those expectations.

I had that reaction to Shenzhen I/O, which is literally just tinkering with microcontrollers and stuff, but fake. I've read enough real datasheets, thanks.

I love Factorio though, it's much more about building and strategy than optimization and puzzle-solving. You can do the latter if you want to, or you can just play with trains.

I also struggled to get into Shenzhen I/O, but I loved TIS-100 because the "fake hardware" is so distinctive and interesting compared to most real microprocessors.

Yes for some. For others, it fulfills the programming feels without need to handle side effects and it's 100% reliable, unlike programming which always need to handle errors 70% of time. It's relaxing

I don't know, my coding side projects don't run out of ammo and get devoured by giant bugs

IMO the challenge comes from within. Can you really funnel everything into one central factory by train alone? Without traffic jams? Or can you make $XX,XXX,XXX by date YYYY?

There are quite a lot of mods (called NewGRFs), ones like FIRS make the game a lot more complex and challenging by making the economy more involved. There are other ways to increase the difficulty with mods, or just with AI players. I agree that the base game can lead to Too Much Money very quickly, which does feel pointless quickly.

Yeah, one of the things that I always really loved about the Impressions Games as a kid was they featured campaigns of ramping difficulty.

It turned it from "just build a city/logistics framework" to "build a city that meets these requirements, and then move to a map with harder logistical challenges".

It really helped me get into the city building and logistics genre rather than just dumping you into a pure sandbox, and the only recent games I can think of that had proper campaigns were Frostpunk (sort of) and Nebuchadnezzar (which has... other issues)

At one point in my longest / most dedicated playthrough I had a huge monorail multi track going square around the map, thing was a money printer. Really satisfying to set up.

Clear your calendar and give Factorio a try.

That't the thing - its not ablut the company, but about building the best network that can get anything and anyone anywhere on the map efficiently, withou trains locking up somwhere. Thats much harder tha just the very simple economy model.

Challenge: make the biggest, most scalable junction out there that never blocks any train at full capacity.

It’s this type of challenge that keeps things fun for me, but at the same time, feels a lot like the problems I’m solving at work.

openttdcoop's Wiki and blog is a great way to learn how to build these types of junctions:

https://wiki.openttdcoop.org/Line_hierarchy

https://wiki.openttdcoop.org/Backbone_Hub

If you prefer a video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-YfxugbgQqs

Absolutely, I’m already a long time member of the community, and I recommend everyone to look it up.

You ever play Simutrans? That game is brutal. To this day I have no clue how to get the scale necessary for profitable passenger rail.

Use trains to transport passangers from town to town, and connect them to buses to shuffle people to their final destination. Have a network that connects the whole map (easier said than done, requires lots of capital) and I guarantee all your vehicles will be profitable.

This is why I like Simutrans: the passengers want to go from A to B.

By the way in Tycoon there was a bug (extra multiplication) that caused larger towns to generate insane number of passengers. It was copied all the way to OpenTTD then it was turned into option.

the game i really loved in this genre was railroad tycoon 2; not so much for the gameplay (though that was great too) but because somehow it really managed to evoke the feel of growing a country and a rail network hand in hand. openttd just didn't have the same atmospheric quality when i tried it (though that was admittedly years ago and it might have come a long way since)

That game also had one of the best soundtracks. I think that kind of thing is under appreciated for immersion.

Try Workers & Resources: Soviet Republic, especially on realism mode.

You've haven't figured out the hard part then: Passenger traffic.

OpenTTD towns perpetually grow as long as you service them. Which means that every passenger station will have infinite lines (as towns grow, more-and-more passengers will need to be serviced across all your stops).

This means that OpenTTD is designed to automatically make passenger traffic "harder", there's always more passengers to carry. The limit is purely the design of your railway. You might have to put the game on fast-forward for 30-ingame-simulated-years before the towns grow to that size, but it always happens.

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Industry in the game also grows bigger, but related to service station %. Early trains cannot service any industry quickly enough to consistently make industrial growth, but later trains with higher speeds will leads to more station% bonuses, making the late game also fill up with coal, lumber, steel, and other materials.

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There's no challenge on the money side. Just place 2 airports on the biggest towns across the map and you'll never run out of money. (Distance x speed traveled leads to profits, and airplanes are fastest and travel the furthest without any rail-costs, making this an appropriate strategy even early in the game)

The "real" challenge is: how many passengers can your rail-junction support? Can you max out an airport?

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My issue with OpenTTD is that the game sometimes wants to pretend its 1x1km blocks, but other times that doesn't make sense at all. Ex: Bus stations are 1x1, and there's no way my bus stops around town are 1km wide.

I think the main thing OpenTTD needs is a "rebalance". Maybe the grid needs to be 10x10 meters (10,000x more detailed) than currently.

I think this 1km x 1km limitation was because computers in the 90s were not good enough for a more detailed simulation. But we have the weird ship-behavior (because ships don't collide with each other), and other such issues partially due to this weird size incoherence in the game.

Love TTD and OpenTTD has done a great job- I've put a lot of hours into it- but, it's honestly just a bit old hat now. No matter the industry mod or the NGRFs added, it's just not enough to keep me engrossed for long. I imagine I'll still return for a few days every year or so to play a new game, but really it's out of nostalgia.

Man, the hours I spent on this game. Haven’t played it in years and won’t any time soon because family dominates my time but is it weird to imagine myself whiling away whole days on this (and Civ) when I’m retired?

Retirement goals.

It’s a damn sight cheaper than golf.

If you don't yelling trash, noobs and gg ez in games like league, dota, cod or cs, is it retirement? /s

Looking forward to a 3D version of TTD sitting off to the side on my desk in my mixed reality headset. Rendering in 3D seems done already https://www.tt-forums.net/viewtopic.php?t=86412

Looks like development stalled about 4 years ago, but that looks amazing

a little known fact is the PS1 version released in Japan had a full 3d mode

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KY6uIxKpItM

My favourite game, all categories. Endless hours of gameplay, and you can play it on almost anything!

Any tips for someone new to it? Ive tried to get into it a few times and get too overwhelmed. I really like Cities in Motion (and trains in Factorio...), OpenTTD seems like a game I'd like if I could figure it out

I'd try watching the intro YouTube series by MasterHellish and concentrating on a particular industry to start with, it can get overwhelming when there's lots going on.

Play online, there's a small community running regular public coop games.

The downside is the games are typically pinned to an exact nightly build. I got tired of that, but it's managable for a finite duration to get you started.

Restrict yourself to trains for a while. Things get a little simpler.

What're you overwhelmed to? If it's signaling, try to use one way signal with loops at the end for turnaround. If you need junctions, look it online and just copy it without much thinking until you get better with this.

Turn off vehicles breakdowns, and there's setting to change towns to follow 2x2 or 3x3 grid, which will make building easier.

To make early money, look for two cities (they have City label on their name) with high enough population and close enough distance, and make 7 length station on both. You'll want to run 7 length on every passenger train in the end, it'll simplify the design.

The ui and menus may be confusing at first, but you'll get used to it.

Why do you like it? I haven't played much, but rather disliked OpenTTD because people appeared at a random station and didn't seem to care where you take them? If it is so, what is the point? If it is not so, what did I misunderstand?

I like Simutrans [0], in which people want to get from A to B and are willing to change between bus/train/plane. The routes which are central to one's network really need to be able to bear a lot of passengers.

[0]: https://www.simutrans.com/

There is an improvement in the options called cargo distribution (cargodest for short) which assigns them a destination among available ones on your network when they're spawned. This is a bit unlike simutrans where destinations are generated and then passengers only appear in your stations when it's reachable.

There were attempts to introduce more simutrans-esque behaviour in patches called cargodest, but it proved to be unacceptable performance wise for the map and network sizes that OpenTTD uses.

So, with cargodest does the cargo change from a bus to a train?

And without cargodest, what is the point of OpenTTD? I honestly struggle to understand this game if passengers appear randomly and pay the full price to go wherever you like to take them.

Cargo can change from bus/trams to trains anyway, either from manual orders or with cargodist.

It's probably also worth mentioning that cargo quantities are usually more limited at first. Primary cargo especially grows slowly. Passengers can grow very quickly if the player understands the city growth mechanics (the count is a function of city size), but even with cargodist if you make an actual network they will dictate their stop.

For me the appeal is more the mid-late game micro-optimisations, like how to make a junction work when there's constant incoming trains.

I found the UI in Simutrans to be near incomprehensible.

It is!

I sometimes wonder if anyone's built a network diagramming / visualisation / live monitoring tool based on the OpenTTD engine?

20 years....

Factorio feels like it's the only thing that's really come close since!

It is available on MacOS M2 with brew: brew install --cask openttd

It is also on GOG and other game stores so for anyone who also plays commercial games it is easy to track updates the same way you do with other games.

https://www.gog.com/en/game/openttd

I like the idea of OpenTTD, but some things just always bothered me with basically all games in the genre. No shunting - which would make dealing with small suppliers more efficient, if they'd exist in the first place -, and cities and industries basically just keep growing as long as you have the transport capacity. For some towns, more growth just makes no sense. Same goes for industries in certain locations.

In the original TTD, you could trigger an integer overflow by building a very long tunnel from one end of the world to the other, so that the billions of money subtracted got negative. ;)

https://www.playdosgames.com/online/transport-tycoon/

I remember getting this bug on accident when I was a kid. I was building a tunnel, but clicked the wrong tile. It popped up a huuuge sum of money and I got scared that I messed up and I'll go bankrupt, only to realize I now had 2B dollars...

This is the first and last game that kept me engaged for a continuous 24 hours when I discovered the multiplayer.

OpenTTD 13.4 Released - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36940233 - July 2023 (22 comments)

OpenTTD's Infrastructure in 2023 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36706453 - July 2023 (79 comments)

OpenTTD 13.0 Released - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34674066 - Feb 2023 (82 comments)

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

OpenTTD 12.0 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28974525 - Oct 2021 (1 comment)

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

OpenGL 3D viewport renderer for OpenTTD (2019) [video] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26823536 - April 2021 (1 comment)

OpenTTD Went to Steam to Solve a Hard Problem - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26772257 - April 2021 (2 comments)

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

SpaceY 1.0 – a SpaceX-inspired addon for OpenTTD game (2020) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26390602 - March 2021 (1 comment)

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

OpenTTD 1.10.0 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22752066 - April 2020 (2 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)

Ask HN: How do I begin an open source game executable project like OpenTTD? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1780212 - Oct 2010 (1 comment)

It's amazing, how much new features still can be added to this game for so many years.

I read that as openTDD, and the comments about it being a game had me confused for a bit.

Same here. I wondered how TDD could be more open than it is already...

i just happen to try this game recently... is it just a micromanager sim? seems like (early game at least) i am just micro managing a bunch of trucks and trains telling them where to go individually.

Cool, thank you for creating this :)

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