Railroad Tycoon II | Hacker News Reader

Railroad Tycoon II

filfre.net

293 pointsdoppp172 comments

> In this reviewer’s opinion, it was a sparkling creative success as well as a commercial one, making it all the more deserving of remembrance. We’ve seen a fair number of train games built on similar premises in the years since 1998, but I don’t know that we’ve ever seen a comprehensively better one.

RRT2 is my all time favorite game, and has yet to find a spiritual successor in my heart. Alongside Anno 1602, it may be the oldest PC game I regularly open up and play for fun.

The gameplay is still so good. The fact that the game is so open-ended and also so cutthroat, combined with the procedurally generated maps means it always feels fresh to play, even all these years later. The UI has aged but has not gotten in the way.

And yes, as reviewer describes, it absolutely nails the theme. The sound design, the visuals, the music, the historical setting. Things feel gritty and real and tough. Just like the game's treatment of Robber Barons, the game perfectly balances romanticism with cynicism. The game made me love trains.

I still remember learning as a child how stock trading on the margin worked when I simultaneously made and then lost a massive fortune attempting to buy out a rival.

I need to load this one up again and see how it plays. One of my complaints in most of the train and tycoon style games these days is they are too darn easy from a strategy perspective or they require casts amount of micro managing.

I've played a railroad game that felt reminiscent of RRT, but after a while it just felt tedious, more like a slow incremental game than a decent train game.

The stock management portion of the game adds a lot of depth. Strategy-wise, RTII is pretty simple still - a simple line between two reasonably sized cities will be profitable, so long as you keep the number of lines between the two low enough. But they can be more profitable if you're smart about which cities are connected.

But trying to acquire the entire company is actually pretty difficult. You can buy stock on margin, but the rates are oppressively high, so it only makes sense to do so in short burst between expansion phases. But there's still risk, the economy can go south or the expansion may not be as profitable as expected, and if that happens, there's the risk of loans being called and your stock being liquidated.

I'd say most of my enjoyment of the game stems from the effort to amass a personal fortune. Eventually, you do learn how to execute various securities frauds, which is pretty entertaining itself.

> Strategy-wise, RTII is pretty simple still - a simple line between two reasonably sized cities will be profitable

I would disagree. On hard enough difficulties intercity traffic is too seasonal. Also, continued traffic to the same city decreases the value of goods shipped there. So you still have to do some fussy industry routing as well to usually succeed. You're also racing against opponents to beat them to connecting to major cities.

It's not necessarily rocket science, but it's an enjoyable enough puzzle in it's own right.

> You're also racing against opponents to beat them to connecting to major cities.

Although the AI players have some interesting limitations – they'll never connect a city you've already connected to, and they'll never build a line that crosses one of your own lines. To be fair, I don't know how important those fudges are for balancing the game, and if so, how the playing strength of the AI players could be balanced in a more realistic fashion (plus considering that the game is from almost thirty years ago)…

For most cities, the first few loads often have enough profit to cover like 10-15% of the build costs, with the first year usually covering 25-35% of the build costs. After two years or so, with no other expansion, cargo trade will be dramatically reduced and the bulk the cargo will be passenger/mail cargo, but so long as you don't allow empty shipments, the line should remain profitable.

The fun comes from trying expand as fast as possible. But it's pretty difficult to actually fail.

The trade model in RT2 is broken in ways that make it fun, but also kind of predictable. You get paid a whole lot more for long hauls than for short ones, and you’re less likely to satiate demand that way. In most maps it makes more sense to deliver coal to a steel mill from 500 miles away than it does to haul it from the mine next door. This pushes you to build massive, sprawling rail networks rather than tight, efficient local ones. Which is clearly tuned for fun over realism. RT3 turns the knob toward realism in a way that sucks a lot of the fun out.

It is a widely different game and theme, but manor lords is very good and has some innovations that reminded me of RRT when it came out. If you like this kind of games I suggest you look at it.

I like Manor Lords. Yeah, I'm a big fan of all of the survivalist city-builders that have come out since Banished (Planetbase, Frostpunk, Timberborn). They don't remind me anything of RRT, lol. But I definitely think they appeal to the same type of gamer.

'against the storm' is an interesting twist on the genre, if you haven't checked that one out yet

> definitely think they appeal to the same type of gamer.

That is what I meant by "it remind me of RRT". I feel "at home" when playing them.

> and has yet to find a spiritual successor in my heart

OpenTTD, Simutrans?

RRT2 leaned heavily into the financial aspects, it was quite different to the original railroad tycoon.

Personally I preferred railroad tycoon 1 to transport tycoon, but either way railroad tycoon 2 was different.

I miss A-Train.

RRT2 focused much more on business and economics and less on routing puzzles and micromanagement. OpenTTD is good but very... sterile.

it’s super easy though. i had a hard time getting into rrt games.

Anno 1602 was my favorite game when I was young, I wonder what game type do you usually play? Official single player missons? Community custom missions or multiplayer?

I usually just open up a random map and fart around. It's just a fun, chill city builder for me.

The subsequent Anno games are amazing as well, but Anno 1602 scratches the same itch and can run on an ancient laptop when travelling. Also, it's not locked behind Ubisoft's cancerous PC launcher.

one of my all time favourite games too. for me the best aspect was that I felt I was playing out the story of how railroads helped settle a continent, so its spiritual peers were civilisations and to a lesser extent simcity. the closest modern game I've found that captures that same sort of evolving story + open ended management aspect is stellaris.

You might want to look into Shadow Empire (2020), which, among things like wargaming, planetary simulation, roleplaying and leader management, also features a complex logistics system (with also railroads), as well as stock market like trading !

thanks, that does look excellent!

Speaking of older games that never had a successor that quite managed to capture what they did well, there's also SimTower, where the main successors are Yoot Tower (which never really made it out of Japan) and Project Highrise, which just doesn't scratch the same itch.

There were not a lot of published games, but I seem to remember there being a handful of flash game derivatives. I played the heck out of Corporation Inc on Armorgames back in the day.

I'd suggest trying Railway Empire and it's sequel. It's the closest successor I've found.

There was a Railroad Tycoon 3, made mostly by the same team in the same office in Fenton. The changes to a more free-flowing tracks didn't necessarily make the game better, and were a headache for most of the production.

I was also told that there were attempts to make the economic simulation far more dynamic, simulating that the cargo could leave by other transport methods, as you'd find in a more serious economic simulation. That just made the game worse: The more efficient the market gets, the harder it is to find the profit, and the more likely that an old 'good' route suddenly stops making money, which is just annoying in a single player game.

It's a common problem with market-centric games: Good simulations make everything unfun, as most of the enjoyment comes from easily finding opportunities or getting away with misbehavior that would make real-life barons very difficult. This is IMO why you don't find many spiritual successors: Most steps forward would be steps back when it comes to making the game fun. So you'll find games focusing just on the tracks, but as puzzles (like the Train Valley Series). Optimizing routes trading items (spaceways), or outright market manipulation (Offworld Trading Company). Doing it all at once basically demands copying the game with newer graphics.

> RRT2 is my all time favorite game, and has yet to find a spiritual successor in my heart.

Aside from OpenTTD, the only games that come to mind are more modern in both their looks and how they play, but they might be worth a shot regardless.

Transport Fever (1 and 2) - the first game can be found for cheap, the second game has quite possibly the best UI of any game in the genre, plus you get trains, trucks, boats and planes, large and pretty maps with towns that develop into proper cities over time.

Mashinky - a more grid based game with trains, trucks and planes, as well as an interesting token based economy system, where you unlock new types of resources as you move along within the game world and therefore have to build out your network gradually, ensuring that everything works okay as it scales up.

Train World - a pretty recent game about trains, which has a larger scale than any of the other games I've played in the genre, might need a bit more polish but is pretty promising! It is focused purely on trains though, so is a bit more of a focused experience when it comes to actually laying out the network and setting up lines.

Workers & Resources: Soviet Republic - a slightly different genre (city builder), but it puts you in charge of both the economy aspect, as well as city building (and utilities like electricity, heating, water and sewage, which can be toggled on/off), production chains of various resources to use or export, transportation for citizens and a bunch more stuff. There's a lot of different mechanisms, but it doesn't feel horribly complex if you have some time to sink into it and it's quite lovely.

Honestly I also liked OpenTTD, but couldn't really get past the UI long term, it has that classic feel sure, but just wasn't quite as pleasant to use as in some of the other games.

I played the Linux version the article mentions while at Goldman Sachs; a colleague on the Red Hat coverage team gave me a boxed copy of Corel Linux including the game. The port ran very well on my Red Hat Linux box at home.

In retrospect it was part of a brief flurry of Linux ports of major games. I also got to play Return to Castle Wolfenstein and Neverwinter Nights; in both cases the publishers made Linux clients available for download that use the retail version's assets. Despite the valiant efforts of Wine and related projects, the world would have to wait 15 more years before Proton leveraged Wine technology to bring quasi-native games to Linux, and 20 years before Steam Deck made it the norm or close to it.

That reminds me of 1999, where I threw a party to help my friends modify their Celeron 300A CPUs so they could run dual-socket. My dual 300A running at 450MHz would run Starcraft under WINE faster than Windows could run it because at the time Windows couldn't do multi-core. Under Linux one processor would run the graphics (in X) and the other would run the game mechanics, and it would blaze.

I hate you.

Well, just envy hate and just momentarily. Back then, such hacks were harder to find/discover. I would have loved to do that hack, I yearned for true multicpu.

That stuff was all over Slashdot at the time, where I heard about it; even got one and ran it for awhile, eventually relegating it to a Linux server.

For some reason I feel like running home stuff fell out of favour. Or perhaps, I stopped doing it. I would prefer to do it again however I don’t ever have an idea what to do with it since these days I just stream everything from the internet. And I have plenty of cloud compute for whatever I want to do.

People call it "homelab" or "data hoarding" these days, but yes, the easy access to hours and hours of movies and music was "solved" for the average person by the content streaming sites, so there's not as much a drive as there used to be for it.

Heheheh, drive.

And now I learn that I am average.

If your willing to try /r/homelab and /r/selfhost have great wikis and are good enough entry points to start you on your way.

There is a lot you can do with a rPi and an 8TB HDD!

It really is a world of difference - XBMC 20+ years ago made your TV a wonder to behold, more powerful than anything anyone else would have (and desirable, too!).

Now a full Plex + JellyFin + Infuse setup just makes it feel like some sort of knockoff Netflix.

There are still advantages. But they’re not as noticeable (main one being if you can find it, you can have it instead of having to search various streaming platforms).

yes i remember setting up a system through xbmc that made it so the tv would appear to have cable channels that were built from everything that was on my storage. So you had channels for different genres or cartoons or movies or whatever. and you could flip through the channels and watch whatever was on. and now it's just that you can even watch digitizations of old vhs recordings of television on youtube if you want. there just seems to be no need to do all that work and when you do, it never seems terribly nice and half the time things are falling over. It was fun when i was a student but now I actually want to watch television if i sit in front of the tv, not try and fix whatever broke to make it work again.

Yeah, though one really nice thing I've discovered is that JellyFin has support for what it calls "home videos" and that + Infuse means the family has access to all those recordings to take but never watch, like kid's recitals, etc.

Was that the period of time when you got more bang for your buck building a PC with dual-socket Celerons than one high-end Pentium?

EDIT: An excellent retrospective on it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UE-k4hYHIDE

Yes, the dual Celeron 300As, if you could take advantage of multiple cores, were faster than the higher end CPUs, particularly if you overclocked to 450MHz. My box was stable at 450MHz for around a year, then I had to gradually down-clock it, eventually back to 300. Never really did much to track down why that was, just rolled with it and figured I should be grateful for the overclocking I had.

I also ran a dual Celeron system overclocked to 450mhz - it was great value in 1999. Abit even launched a motherboard that let you run dual Celerons without modifying the processors, the legendary BP6:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ABIT_BP6

This was first board to let you use unmodified Celerons, the "hack" to let dual CPUs work with those chips was performed at the motherboard level, no CPU pin modifications needed.

The real problem with this setup was that a vanilla Pentium 3 would run circles around the dual Celerons. I had my Celerons clocked to something ridiculous at one point like 600MHz and still could not beat the Pentium.

You are forgetting the massive price difference though. For sure a P3 was great if you had an unlimited budget, but a quick look at pricing sheets for September 1999 shows a 600mhz P3 at ~650 dollars.

The 300mhz celerons, easily over-clockable to 450/500mhz, where only ~150 dollars each. These prices are in 1999 dollars too, I haven't adjusted for inflation.

It was the value proposition, not the outright performance that made dual celeron builds attractive, especially in an age where we were having to upgrade far more often than we do today to keep up with latest trends.

In 1999 I vividly remember not being able to afford a P3 build, was largely why I ended up with the BP6. The P3 also had significant supply issues throughout its lifespan, which didn't help pricing at retail either.

I recall some kind of Intel trade show event where attendees got to buy a P3-500 and an SE440BX motherboard for $250.

It was awesome and was my main computer for years.

iirc those overclocks needed thermal paste to be reapplied, plus dust in case probably crushed airflow

Did you pet you cpus at the end and say something like, “you had a good run boys but we best be putting you out to pasture.”

About a year later, I got the P3-550 that overclocked to 733. Not quite as good of an overclock in terms of percentages, but I ran that machine for 5 years with no issues.

I feel relying on WINE and Proton instead of building a proper GNU/Linux ecosystem will eventually backfire, it didn't happen already because thus far Microsoft chosen to ignore it.

However as Steam vs XBox slowly escalates, Microsoft might eventually change their stance on the matter, forcing devs to rely on APIs not easier to copy, free licenses for handhelds, taking all Microsoft owned studios out of Steam, see which company has bigger budget to spend on lawyers, whatever.

WINE and Proton piggyback on Microsoft's guarantees of Win32 stability. As long as that remains in place (which should be for all intents and purposes forever given MS's customers) they can't really do anything about it.

So, next time you hear the joke about Win32 ABI being the only stable ABI on Linux, remember it's funny because it's true!

If all one wants it to run games that use the Win32 API as defined today, surely.

If all one wants it to run games that use the Win32 API as defined tomrrow, anyone's guess.

Note this is a huge improvement from 'binary is guaranteed to not work in the future, probably not too distant' of the standard model of Linux distributions.

If the API only has additions, then Microsoft would still need to convince game devs to actually use them (and Valve will point out that if they do, their game will not work on Steam Deck, so there's a clear downside).

If some APIs are removed, it breaks older Windows games. I can't think of any historical API that has been completely removed in this way - even stuff like DirectDraw and DirectPlay is still there even though it has been deprecated for decades.

See ABK deal, Microsoft has tolerated SteamDeck thus far, they own the platform.

What about it? I’m just curious what specifically do you think MS could do that wouldn’t get them into extreme trouble with the EU/FTC?

They could create a new interface that's somehow more efficient, and work with Unreal / Unity / Godot and a few others so it's just a recompile for them, but it's a bigger problem for Wine, perhaps? I'm just thinking out loud.

They “could” also create a new interface that's somehow more efficient for Windows. Oh wait..

I don’t think MS has the attention span for stuff like that. Especially considering the limited short to medium term payoff.

They could buy Unity though. Considering how mismanaged that company is it wouldn’t be such a bad outcome. Of course large acquisitions are very costly and risky these days.

If Linux gaming picks up and it gains significant market share then that is not an issue. Game developers will not use APIs that don’t work on the machines of ~20% of their users (or won’t make it mandatory, anyway)

Considering the alternative (ie. the native approach) would result in having very few games on Linux anyway that doesn’t seem that bad.

Don't forget Windows finally made Year of the Linux Desktop(tm) a reality, Windows is the best desktop Linux distro (Android gets the mobile Linux distro crown).

Windows' desktop environment is much too lackluster for that. It's uniquely inconsistent (many distinct toolkits with irreconcilable look-and-feel, even in the base system), has poorly organized system configuration apps that are not very capable, takes a long time to start up so that the desktop becomes usable, is full of nasty dark patterns, suffers an infestation of ads in many versions.

Besides the many issues with the desktop itself, Windows offers piss poor filesystem performance for common developer tools, plus leaves users to contend with the complexity of a split world thanks to the (very slow) 9pfs shares used to present host filesystems to guest and vice-versa.

And then there's the many nasty and long-lived bugs, from showstopping memory leaks to data loss on the virtual disks of the guests to broken cursor tracking for GUI apps in WSLg...

> It's uniquely inconsistent (many distinct toolkits with irreconcilable look-and-feel, even in the base system)

While I agree that Windows has long since abandoned UI/UX consistency, it's not like that is unique: On desktop Linux I regularly have mixed Qt/KDE, GTK2, GTK3+/libadwaita and Electron (with every JS GUI framework being a different UI/UX experience) GUIs and dialogs. I'm sure libcosmic/iced and others will be added eventually too.

> On desktop Linux I regularly have mixed Qt/KDE, GTK2, GTK3+/libadwaita and Electron (with every JS GUI framework being a different UI/UX experience) GUIs and dialogs.

And you can choose to install GTK+, Qt, and Electron apps on Windows or macOS, too. That has no bearing on the consistency of the desktop environment itself (not on Linux or on macOSa or on Windows). That fact is simply not relevant here.

You could point to some specific distros which choose to bundle/preinstall incongruous software— those are operating systems that ship applications based on multiple, inconsistent UI toolkits. But that's neither universal to desktop Linux operating systems nor inherent in them. Many cases that do serve as examples by the definition above are still not comparable to the state of affairs on Windows— for instance, KDE distros that ship a well-integrated Firefox as their browser— are on the whole much more uniform than the Windows UI mess.

> could point to some specific distros which choose to bundle

Why does that matter if that’s not how most users do it? There is no magical dividing lines between a distribution and the user choosing to install a random collection of apps on their own.

'Desktop Linux' isn't an operating system but a family or class of operating systems. Linux distros are operating systems. If we are to make mewningful comparisons to macOS and Windows, then we must compare like to like.

But they are inherently different and not really comparable to macOS or Windows so it wouldn’t make a lot of sense.

For instance where exactly do you draw a line between which app/package/component is part of a Linux distribution and which is third party? OTH it’s more than obvious for proprietary systems.

> has poorly organized system configuration app

To be fair almost all Linux distros are as bad if not worse in this regard.

Things like YAST which are supposed to fix that are unambiguously horrible in their own right (extremely slow, crappy UX etc)

> I feel relying on WINE and Proton instead of building a proper GNU/Linux ecosystem will eventually backfire, it didn't happen already because thus far Microsoft chosen to ignore it.

Microsoft can't do shit against WINE/Proton legally, as long as either project steers clear of misappropriated source code and some forms of reverse engineering (Europe's regulations are much more relaxed than in the US).

The problem at the core is that Linux (or to be more accurately, the ecosystem around it) lacks a stable set of APIs, or even commonly agreed-upon standards in the first place, as every distribution has "their" way of doing things and only the kernel has an explicit "we don't break userspace" commitment. I distinctly remember a glibc upgrade that went wrong about a decade and a half ago where I had to spend a whole night getting my server even back to usable (thank God I had eventually managed to coerce the system into downloading a statically compiled busybox...).

They surely can, and Valve got lucky UWP didn't took off as they feared.

Microsoft can easily do another go at it.

That is the problem building castles on other vendor platforms.

As reminder,

https://www.extremetech.com/gaming/127475-valve-confirms-ste...

Games aren’t going to suddenly start targeting only updated copies of windows 11 though… if they target even win 10 then they need to be API compatible with what’s currently there in windows. It doesn’t matter what new stuff comes out. Just like how we had to keep using ie6 compatible code for ages for the 5% of people still on windows xp even though it kept us from using modern web tech for everyone else.

Depends on how much Microsoft decides Windows Store and XBox App are relevant for game developers targeting the PC going forward.

They can't stop publishers from targeting steam/proton, though. The publishers will go to where the market is. Sure maybe they can restrict the version published to whatever store windows has but they can't prevent the one distributed with steam targeting an older version.

They can on the studios they own, and publish.

Right now, they are not even making their own games exclusive to Windows Store or the XBox App (see MSFS 2024, Age of Empires series, Forza, etc...).

Because until recently SteamDeck was a non issue for Microsoft.

If it starts being a big issue, they won't ignore it.

Microsoft is going the opposite of what you're suggesting. Their games are coming to Steam, Playstation and Switch. Also, their game division isn't exactly thriving right now. They have a ton of studios, but they are not selling hardware very well right now.

The more that time goes on, and the more entrenched steamOS/Proton becomes, they will not have any sort of easy time trying to lock-in to Windows. Even now in the earliest days of steamOS, there is blow-back when a game does not support the Steam Deck (which means Proton).

Playstation and Switch, for sure.

Steam, not on detriment of Windows, how can they allow something like SteamOS to put Windows to shame, with their own APIs?

I can bet on them changing that, lets see who's got deeper pockets.

Most of their biggest games already are on Steam, though!

I would posit that in this scenario it is Valve who has the deeper pockets. It's a privately owned company and not beholden to the whims of a quarterly driven revenue cycle, and it's a matter of life or death for the organization.

In contrast, gaming is essentially a side show for Microsoft. The resources required to push Valve off it's pedestal would have higher returns invested elsewhere.

> They surely can, and Valve got lucky UWP didn't took off as they feared.

So what, assuming it had taken off it would just be yet another set of crap APIs to develop wrappers for.

So is the burden of playing with other people toys.

Still a nicer problem to have than developing “non crappy” APIs that nobody uses or cares about.

There's a good chance that if that if Microsoft doesn't act soon enough, and a lot more devices running Steam OS are released, Proton might become the de-facto platform against which many new games are developed, and which engines target.

At that point, there is nothing Microsoft can do.

Agreed. I actually think it might be too late at this point since it takes so long to turn the aircraft carrier.

Microsoft can't realistically deprecate/remove Win32, so all they could do is entice with new APIs. That will work for some games, but especially with the frameworks in place, they'll have to be really good to get people to abandon Steam Deck compatibility to use them.

They already control enough studios, PC and XBox market.

SteckDeck compatibility relies on "emulating" Windows ecosystem.

Remember DR-DOS, OS/2 and EEE PC.

EEE PC was tiny, IBM (OS/2) were full of hubris, what happened to DR-DOS ?

Valve is neither tiny, nor does seem to be under the thrall of hubris. Also Microsoft seems complacent so far, though that might change.

Originally Windows was designed to detect and not run if using DR-DOS.

They bought a lot of companies and are doing their level best at running them into the ground. Xbox is a dying platform. They may try some things that they've tried before (GFWL) but they're not going to succeed this time either.

Kernel-level anti-cheat is a bigger threat to gaming on Linux than anything Microsoft has directly done, but even that is fixable.

> Kernel-level anti-cheat is a bigger threat to gaming on Linux than anything Microsoft has directly done, but even that is fixable.

I can see companies sending out hardened Linux distros to hardcore Valorant players for official tournaments and such.

> Kernel-level anti-cheat is a bigger threat to gaming on Linux than anything Microsoft has directly done, but even that is fixable.

Agreed. Valve providing some service that gives local games less info, so they literally don't know where players are until they need to, might spell an end to wall hacking at least.

Sure, MS could purposefully try and make their first party games not run on Linux.

However.. why? It would be the same as purposefully losing money but not selling on Steam.

Besides that what could they do? Within getting into all types of legal trouble?

Microsoft controls Windows and DirectX, Valve only gets to play until Windows landlord allows it.

DR-DOS, OS/2 and EEE PC.

Lets see if SteamOS makes the list as well, this is after all round two, Steam Machines didn't go that well.

Microsoft tried to put their games on their own store but they crawled back to Steam.

Honestly Windows is more open than MS haters give it credit for.

Yeah, GFWL was a debacle that has thankfully been largely forgotten. If Microsoft couldn't pull it off back then, they're not going to today.

They now own Activision-Blizzard-King, which even now (new Battle.net) is still better than GFWD ever was.

They did, does mean they will let Valve screw SteamOS on their face.

And what exactly would they do?

The Steam Deck is basically the successor to the Steam Machines. The actual hardware didn't go that well, but they laid the foundation in software for what we have now.

So, in a way, the Steam Machines were a great success.

Also, Valve has (for better and worse) far more power and control in the gaming ecosystem than most companies Microsoft has to deal with.

Depends on how many key AAA studios are part of Microsoft Game Studios portfolio.

> Microsoft controls Windows and DirectX, Valve only gets to play until Windows landlord allows it.

DirectX has to stay reasonably close to Vulkan. And Vulkan is not an afterthought for graphics card manufacturers, quite unlike OpenGL of yore.

And Win32 (sans Vulkan/DX) is mostly feature-complete for gaming purposes. Manufacturers can just target the current state of Win32 for a decade more, if not even longer.

It certainly is, in what concerns NVidia, they keep innovating first with Microsoft on DirectX, and then eventually come up with Vulkan extensions.

Last example, AI shaders announced at CEBIT.

Vulkan has turned into the same extension spaghetti as OpenGL.

> It certainly is, in what concerns NVidia, they keep innovating first with Microsoft on DirectX, and then eventually come up with Vulkan extensions.

I don't get that impression. I can't remember the last significant feature that was present in DX first, and not immediately or shortly available in Vulkan.

So any more “native” alternative to Proton would do even worse because at least not it’s at least keep Linux in sync with the real world?

On the other hand building Linux binaries and keeping them running for years without maintenance has proven far more difficult than emulating Windows.

For an example track down the ports Loki games did many years ago and try to get them running on a modern machine. The most reliable way for me has been to install a very old version of Linux (Redhat 8, note: Not RHEL 8) on a VM and run them in there.

Naturally it means GNU/Linux will never improve until being forced upon.

It just means Microsoft has put more emphasis on ABI compatibility. This makes sense. In the open source world ABI compatibility is less of an issue because you can just recompile if there are breaking changes. ABI compatibility is far more important in a commercial closed source context where the source may be lost forever when a company shuts down or discontinues a product line.

It would be really nice to see open source being more widespread in games, though of course it's harder because they are more art than software.

Splitting code and audiovisual assets might work ?

Even then the rights get dicey when they include third party libraries and development systems. Doom famously had issues with the sound library they used.

Plus, with commercial software it often happens that the code only builds cleanly on one specific ancient version of a closed source compiler in a specifically tweaked build environment that has been lost to the ages. Having the source helps a lot, but it is not a panacea.

Yet both of these issues seem to plague closed source software more than open source ?

Doom wasn't developed with open source in mind, was it ?

What open source software "only builds cleanly on one specific ancient version of a closed source compiler in a specifically tweaked build environment that has been lost to the ages" ?

On opens source projects the build system needs to be reasonable enough that anybody can set it up. There are lots of conventions and even tools to help people. On closed source projects it is just Joe the sysadmin who sets up the machines for everybody working on it. Also, open source projects rarely include requirements like "buy a license of this specific version of this proprietary library and install it on your machine".

Doom had the advantage that it was written by a really excellent team with some standout programmers, and it has had plenty of people maintaining the codebase over the years.

> Doom wasn't developed with open source in mind, was it ?

Not sure - Wolfenstein 3D was open sourced in 1995 (two years after Doom was released).

It didn’t for decades (in this specific regard) why does you think it could change?

People running Linux hate software shipped as binaries due to various technical and ideological reasons. Why would this change?

> forcing devs to rely on APIs not easier to copy

Would that still not be easier than developing something stable and finding ways to force 3rd party developers to support Linux? (when you can offer them anything in return)

What a shame, GOG only has the Windows version :-(

I'd love to buy the linux native version.

You probably don't, the old linux binaries are notoriously hard to get to function properly on a modern distribution.

While the kernel interface remained stable across all those years, user space libraries have changed quite a lot, so it's much easier to run the Windows version with wine.

ah, that makes a ton of sense actually. Thanks!

Also, take a look at Heroic (game launcher and library with integrated Wine for GOG/Epic/Amazon Prime), available for Windows too.

Plays just fine under Wine, better than on modern Windows in fact

I had the box set, it was the first Linux game I bought. The flurry was Loki Games, a porting house. They let me help as a beta tester! I got to test Descent III and Mindrover. Next would have been Deus Ex, but they flamed out. One of them, Sam Latinga, built SDL and I believe is still active.

I still have my boxed copy (along with everything Loki produced) in a big box in the garage.

I think Loki also originated OpenAL, which is still around as well.

I remember Corel Linux!

It was the first Linux I ever used, from a PC magazine CD in 1999. A significantly hacked-up KDE 1.1 w/ integrated Wine. To this day, you can find Corel in the copyright dialogs of a few notable KDE apps, e.g. the file archiver Ark.

I'm now looking back on 25 years of Linux use, 19 of them as a KDE developer, including writing large parts of the Plasma 5/6 shell, 6-7 years on the KDE board, and working on the Steam Deck (which ships with KDE Plasma) at a contractor for a hot minute to bring gaming back as well. At least on the personal level it was an impactful product :-)

Same here. The Spanish edition of PC Mag included Core Linux. It was the most pleasant install experience in much, much time (next, next, next, finish)

Was the Linux port made by Loki Software by any chance? That shirt lived company did a lot to make Linux viable for gaming. They developed a bunch of new libraries to help with porting and open sourced them. SDL was one of them.

Edit: OpenAL was another one of their libraries.

Still keep this on my box and crack it open now and again. I also pulled the music out of the distro and put it into my listening rotation while working. You have to add your own hawk screech sounds though :-)

I’m a total sucker for network optimization train games though. Love the crayon rails games which I wrote about here:

https://dave.org/posts/20221206_trains/

> Indeed, in some of the most difficult scenarios, the efficient operation of your railroad provides no more than the seed capital for the real key to victory, your shenanigans on the stock market.

This is in fact what I don't like about RR2. The stock market had too much of a big part in my opinion, and I never enjoyed it.

I liked much more Transport Tycoon (and its open source version OpenTTD) which had much more focus on the mechanics of transportation. Too bad, because I really loved the graphics and some of the mechanics of the game.

I’ve never played this game but it reminds me of some railroad game I did play where you could put all of your money into a commodity, and that would raise the price of the commodity… which would start causing the overall value of your assets to explode exponentially… which allowed you to justify absurd loans from the bank… which compounded in a loop where you could start to break the math of the game as the price of coal detached from reality and your market cap soared into the quadrillions and beyond…

Good times

I don’t think you could quite do that in RRT2, but it wasn’t too hard to abuse the system.

The article mentions that the trains are just representative and in-game journeys can take over a year. What you do is, as soon as the game starts, spend every penny of your company’s money on the longest line you can afford, with one train hauling the most valuable cargo. Try to make it take a little over a year to arrive. As the individual you’re playing, sell all of your company’s stock.

Ongoing maintenance costs will quickly put your company in the red. By the time the end of the year comes around, your company is basically bankrupt, and the terrible fiscal report will devastate your stock price.

Now buy all of your company’s stock practically for free. Proceed to the next year, where your train soon arrives, your cargo pays off handsomely, the debts are more than paid, and your company is on a very healthy position with a very healthy stock price. Enjoy the rest of the game with a substantial personal fortune you can pour into your company if you want to focus on building, or use to wreck competitors if you’re up for that.

It may not be enjoyable, but for about a century, railroad schemes were often as much about entrepreneurial fundraising, land rights, and corruption as about actually delivering infrastructure - it's thematically correct.

Colm Meaney delivers an entertaining performance with regards to this in 'Hell on Wheels'.

There are parts of Pennsylvania that briefly got violent with each other over gauge changes (and thus, which town had a rest stop, and no doubt, which investment would prove profitable). The "Erie Gauge War".

Depends on the rail road. Most were as much about what government subsidies they could get (federal, state and cities all did various things as they saw any railroad as key to their success).

A couple railroads started because there was money to be had in transporting things. They picked routes that made a lot more sense (a compromise of geography and the cities served) even today when we don't have to refill the steam engine with water ever few miles. These are the exception though. Most were trying to get the upfront money and not thinking about the long term success.

This is the same problem with the more recent Offworld Trading Company game. You can take a half an hour building a great colony, harvesting all the resources, building all of the goods, and so on, but none of it really matters. The end game takes about 60-120 seconds and it's all trading on the in-game stock market, resulting in a sudden "you lost" screen popping up even if you did everything else right in the first 29 minutes. Kind of a let down.

> even if you did everything else right in the first 29 minutes.

But you didn't do everything right. What makes OWTC different from most economics sims is that the goal is to quickly establish monopolies on the various planets. So unless you starved the competition of resources, pivoted to producing high-value products from cheap commodities, or speed run to offworld shipments, with an eye towards buying out everyone else, you're not playing to win.

The matches are sprints, not marathons. And faction abilities are critical to victory. You really have to chose matches that favor your faction if you want the upper hand.

Yea, it's entirely possible that I'm simply expecting a different game and just don't find the current one's endgame fun or satisfying. I played it a few times, chugged along building a nice colony, and then suddenly the big full-screen "Haha you lose, your opponent bought you out on the stock market (which you can't prevent)".

I'm trying to think of any games that try to include an in-game stock market, where the gameplay doesn't eventually utterly hinge on playing the in-game stock market instead of whatever else the game was about. Looks like we've discovered a rule: "Take any game about anything, in any genre, and if you add a stock market, the game eventually becomes a stock market simulator instead."

That was one of my initial fears with Shadow Empire, but it somehow doesn't manage to devolve to only that... I guess because there's a variety of brakes applied on trading like trading houses' limited stocks (including in credits), the way how price discovery is gradual between trading regions and not instant cross-planet, and the way they rip off the major factions by taking large trading margins ?

I would argue that OTC without a stock market is barely a game - it would just a race for resources.

IMHO the problem with OTC is that there is not enough opportunity for financial shenanigans. If someone successfully corners the market on the right commodity, there's a runaway leader problem with not much you can do. The game wrapping up early is a grace in those situations.

Huh, I've always just ignored the stock market and haven't had any issues.

Yeah, that reminded me how too easy diplomacy (in particular tech trading) can make almost everything else pointless in some strategy games...

I've been playing a bit of Open Transport Tycoon recently, the trains are by far my favourite aspect and probably the most detailed in the game too. Getting all the track layouts and signalling to be efficient is a challenge under ever increasing demand. https://www.openttd.org/

I also really love this game. It's what originally taught me a lot about the workings of trains, different capabilities of locomotives, the need for sidings due to monetary cost of double-tracking everywhere, etc.

The article mentions the existence of the PSX and Dreamcast ports but does not mention that the DC version is actually re-done in a fully-3D engine as opposed to the traditional approach of the PC version where the 3D models were pre-rendered to 2D graphics covering the multiple angles of rotation. It's one of the Windows CE based Dreamcast games! https://segaretro.org/Windows_CE

Here's a longplay where you can see it: https://youtu.be/a7tgccUpPAc

So many words and not even mentioning RRT3. The successor was a departure in some ways, but so great and dynamic in other ways.

RRT3 economy was great with the addition of the moving of goods outside the rail system it made everything much more organic and realistic as you couldn't just gauge prices anymore

Also runs well under Wine!

RT3, in 3d, made it a model train simulator. Going first-person on a locomotive, puting the camera close exactly like every kid has done with every train set, that was a revolution. I saw that joy once again a few years ago when nerdcubed tried a VR model train simukator.

https://youtu.be/dTmC2a5QSG8

Forget the game for a second. This man’s writing is so lucid that it made me think for a second that he was telling the tale of actual railroads.

One of the best games I have ever played! I still open it sometimes and wonder why I could never find another strategy game that would hook me just as much.

Also learned as a kid about stock and dividends, which proved quite useful later on. There was a bit o geography and history in it as well, plus the music! Why were our parents complaining about us gaming so much!?

I’m so glad to see this game getting some love. It’s been a constant for me ever since I found it at Dollar General when I was a kid.

Must have spent an exorbitant amount of time playing Transport Tycoon and Railroad Tycoon back in the day.

So many fond memories of this game - it was a really fun blend of railroad sim and economic sim that I haven't really found since. I'll never forget the "ding ding ding" sound that goes off when a train pulls into a station and earns you a bit of cash!

Is there a board game equivalent? I'd like to play with my kid, without us staring at a screen.

Ticket to Ride. Has a kids version that I play with my kids from time to time. There's also a very popular adult version plus lots of add-ons I believe.

There is also 1830 and few others

https://www.dicebreaker.com/themes/train-game/best-games/bes...

And for something between Ticket to ride and 18XX games you can try Age of steam - this is a lot better for when you really feel the need to build some railroads and just move stuff and not to have to learn how stock exchange works.

In order of complexity:

- Thicket to Ride series: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgamefamily/17/game-ticket-to-...

- Crayon Rails series: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgamemechanic/2010/crayon-rail...

- Cube Rails series: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgamefamily/18979/series-cube-...

- Age of Steam (with hundreds of print-n-play maps available): https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgamefamily/86/game-age-of-ste...

- 18xx: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgamefamily/19/series-18xx

There are (several) other “train games” that are mostly one-off implementations with a train theme (often route/network building and/or tile placement, but sometimes not), but all of the above are families of several games that share a common system (components) and board game mechanisms, so once you play one, it’s often easy to understand/pick up on others in the same family.

The first, Ticket to Ride is probably the most accessible, and therefore one of the more popular options. But the others definitely offer a deeper experience, if you can handle the (increasing) complexity.

The shortest, simplest equivalent I know that has most of the same 'spice' is Chicago Express/Wabash Cannonball. At first you think it's a game about building a company that tries to get to Chicago first to claim the prize money, but then you realize that this is really about making money, and that maybe the best thing for you is to completely wreck any and all attempts to have anyone, ever, get to Chicago. Plays in an hour, instead of 3+ in your typical train game with this kind of mechanics.

I absolutely loved this game growing up. It scratched a similar itch for me as SimCity. The corporate layer wasn't particularly sophisticated, but it did give me some early insight into finance.

The soundtrack was also incredible, and I wish it were available independently.

> The soundtrack was also incredible, and I wish it were available independently.

For a few euros (and less if you happen to catch a sale), the GOG version is worth it for the soundtrack alone. But yeah, 7-Zip doesn't seem to recognise the installer used by GOG, so you actually have to install the game to get at the soundtrack files.

One day, I might have to go through the trouble to do this!

About the only game from the 90s which I still play regularly, IMHO it's pretty close to the perfect computer game since it strikes just the right balance between simulation and 'arcade-y' fun - and all the modern 're-enactments' I tried so far somehow don't manage to capture the essential of what makes Railroad Tycoon 2 so much fun (the Platinum version runs great on modern computers btw: https://store.steampowered.com/app/7620/Railroad_Tycoon_II_P...).

Not it is the free software or open source version of this game, but OpenLoco https://openloco.io/ is great, and I hope that this game in near future will have a free assets like as OpenTTD https://www.openttd.org/ .

There doesn't seem to be any mention of 2006's Sid Meier's Railroads! which seems to be an evolution of Railroad Tycoon.

I've played "Railroads!" for countless hours - it's an incredible game, especially when LAN'ing with others.

Any reason why this game might be left out?

Was it Railroad Tycoon II which played Robert Johnson music in the background.

Playing the game I developed an appreciation of it. At least I think it was this game that I can't forget...

I have played this game for tons of hours. I wish I could play and enjoy it like I did the first time when I was a kid.

> Where to Get It: Railroad Tycoon Platinum is available as a digital purchase on Steam and GOG.com.

Sadly, for Windows only :(

If you are running Linux, it seems to work well with Proton, though I didn't check it myself: https://www.protondb.com/app/7620

I've played 100s of hours of if under Proton on Linux. Works great.

I've recently been running it via Proton on Linux, and it runs quite smoothly.

(Haven't tried any multiplayer on it though; the game is old enough that networking doesn't automatically mean "use TCP/UDP/IP," so I can see that stumbling bad on modern OSes.)

What would it be ? IPX ?

Didn't that have TCP/UDP/IP emulation already in the DOS era ?

I don't have the game or the manual in front of me, but my recollection is that there are actually four separate networking options, of which TCP/IP and IPX were two.

The Linux version would almost certainly not run on any current Linux. I have a vague memory of trying to run the demo nearly 20 years ago and it failing due to requiring some now-deprecated X11 extension. If you want to try, the Internet Archive does have a Loki software demo CD, which includes Railroad Tycoon 2: https://archive.org/details/linux-games-cd

This worked for me last month on a Mac M2: https://www.portingkit.com/game/278

So cool to have that small beginning (photo of him at the booth) to hitting success

The way the author talked about the feeling of if a sequel could live up to the original, and how it had been mostly forgotten, reminded me of Warlords, which together with civilization and rail road tycoon was the main turn based strategy games of my youth. I remember there was a sequel, but it would always freeze up on our computer.

... And I don't think I've stumbled on anyone on the internet talk its praise.

Was it just an oddity in my games library, or did other people place it along side the classic turn based strategy games of the 90s?

Warlords - especially the second installment - is generally considered one of the 4X classics of the 90s.

The Age of Wonders series was heavily inspired by Warlords (and Master of Magic), and is still around.

Is there anything exactly like Warlords? I'd love a similar game, just more modernized.

It just kind of sucks I wasn't born 80 years earlier. I ran a simulation once. With my business brain and only a $20k loan in 1920 I'd have been a multi-millionaire within 10 years.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com