The Evolution of Roller Coaster Tycoon (1999) | Hacker News Reader

The Evolution of Roller Coaster Tycoon (1999)

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126 pointsSnail_Commando16 comments

Fans of Roller Coaster Tycoon would do well to consider entertaining themselves by playing OpenTTD, a community reverse-engineering / rewriting / extension effort based off Transport Tycoon (Deluxe), which was in turn the predecessor of Roller Coaster Tycoon. (RCT was originally going to be Transport Tycoon 2, but when Chris Sawyer tried out the new track-layout features the idea of roller coasters became obvious, and the game was history.)

Of course, this unusual legacy has some interesting side-effects and it can be a little weird to get into the game (e.g. there's two completely different models of doing signaling, and there's a complete rewrite of the passenger-traffic distribution algorithm that makes things a lot more challenging and fun but is buried in some sub-sub-submenu in the settings' Advanced Mode...)

Think of something a little like Roller Coaster Tycoon, but you get to do more network-design work and make tradeoffs between the expense of building a system right the first time or doing something more scalable for the future, and then seeing it blow up in your face when you try to run too much traffic down a congested line :D

I play a bit of OpenTTD from time to time. There's quite a learning curve, but it's enjoyable. For all the tweaks though, there's a couple that I always want, are always the source of me stopping play:

I don't like negotiating with towns to let me lay down roads and other infrastructure. After a while dealing with this nonsense by planting thousands of trees gets old and doesn't work all the time. I wish I could just turn that off.

I wish resources didn't run out. By the time I have a pretty cool multi-mode transport network worked out, somebody will run out of resources and I have to undo the whole thing. The maps are big enough that infinite resources would still be fun.

The game gets into these weird modes were my boats or trains or whatever are shuttling around tons of mail, or the lines to use service at one stop are unbelievably long and there's no activity anywhere else. I think it's a bug (but I'm open to it being a problem in my transport network as well).

The GUI gets a little obtuse and fussy for my taste. It's okay when you're building up a mode of transport, but once your network starts to get really medium sized you quickly run into trouble trying to keep track of what's going where or doing what.

There are a couple of 'NewGRFs' that can solve some of those problems.

OpenRCT2: https://github.com/IntelOrca/OpenRCT2

Not finished yet though.

The developers behind OpenRCT2 call it open source but because it's a derivative work they don't actually have the ability to license it under anything.

Technically OpenTTD is in the same boat. The first version was decompiled to assembly and ported to C by Ludwig Strigeus, the guy behind uTorrent.

Shameless plug: The guys behind OpenTTD are also working on a remake of RCT called FreeRCT [1]. It's still in its infancy and it doesn't have many features, so any contributions are welcomed!

[1] https://code.google.com/p/freerct/

I think most people know this already but the original RCT was written almost entirely in assembly by Chris Sawyer[1].

It was almost 15 years ago but still not the norm for the time and quite an impressive feat.

[1] http://www.chrissawyergames.com/faq3.htm

I remember reading that and being totally amazed, especially since I personally think RCT 1 and 2 are far superior games to RCT 3. It's a wonder how much discipline and drive went I to those two games - if only we had the code/documentation to review, that'd be a dream come true.

We have the code, just run the binary through a disassembler.

What I think is more interesting is the open source clone: http://freerct.blogspot.ca/ and the indie clone: http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=39904.0

There was also an effort to migrate the ASM to C as a fan project, despite the glaring copyright issue.

Oh yes, of course, but what I meant was the code as it was written. I'm sure, like anything else, comments, and perhaps in this case any whitespace would be removed during assembly!

I'll check those out though, alongside Caesar III, this was one of my favourite games of my childhood.

I never found that writing in Assembler required different skills or mindsets than what I used in other languages. If there is one thing that stood out it is that because assembler is so limited that you automatically 'level up' as a programmer in order to achieve a certain effect, you almost have to otherwise you will never reach your goal.

Let's just say that it is not for people that want instant results and that tend to work sloppy.

A really interesting thing about this is the length of the development cycle. It was released in March 1999, so that's 2.5 years from start to release...I think I would go stir crazy if I worked on a dev project that long without a release. But glad they did, because RCT brought me hundreds hours of enjoyment back in the day.

What will make you appreciate the development cycle even more is that it was one guy, Chris Sawyer.

Nowadays they would release a pre-alpha after half a year and everyone would be done with the game before the full version is out.

I loved that version RCT2, when RCT3 went out I got disappointed, the control feeling was lost...

Looking through those alternatives makes me believe that maybe I'll can enjoy one more time that game...

Parkitect is the real evolution of RCT2, like Gangsters 2 the latest version Omerta has great textures and graphics and the original game style, I hope that Parkitect can reach their goal on time as a Kickstarter project

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