I guess the reason it's been posted today is that it was recently Transport Tycoon's 30th birthday.
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and they even added multiplayer, different AI competitors etc.
i still play it every now and again
And actually there are now 5 different basesets on top of the original TTD one [2]
It also made possible things like releasing the game on Steam and GOG.
0, https://github.com/radek-sprta/awesome-game-remakes
1, https://wiki.openttd.org/en/Archive/Community/Graphics%20Rep...
It triggered my entrepreneurial journey as a kid, and one of the first "open world" experiences I had from games. I would spend weeks trying to figure out what the right strategy was for a specific map.
In many ways, an entrepreneur and VC today, I am still playing that same game, and as the technological landscapes changes, so do the strategies I get to dream up.
(Feels a bit soon to repost somehow…)
https://github.com/bwachter/ttd_addons/blob/master/ttdconsol... is another example of progress - if I remember correctly at the time I did this inotify was in development outside the kernel tree. Nowadays solving this would be trivial with inotify on Linux - and other UNIX variants also mostly gained some form of file monitoring API.
When I discovered OpenTTD as an adult, I was absolutely thrilled.
I sunk god knows how many hours into it. And it even builds and runs on ppc64le!
I was very thrilled to find that this game has been ported to an open source project and also has an online system and community of players. I immediately signed up on a popular forum of players and played it competitively, discovered a lot of optimizations and had my fun again all the way. It was absolutely a refresh to see this game. I will end up teaching it to my kids when they come up to the right age again.
A timeless legend of a game, this is.
However I do wonder if there are any good modern contenders to it. My kids play games on an Android tablet. Even though OpenTTD runs there it doesn't feel native to the touch UI and overall looses the appeal to modern games (which are regrettably 99% crap but there are real gems too).
Long story short, anyone can recommend a high-quality pleasant-to-play economic strategy game for Android? There are tons of games roughly speaking "cats-n-soup alike" which look nice but lack the essence: it's just "use money to upgrade your economy and get more money", a one-dimensional loop without a need for strategy.
Some of the addons, like the FIRS industrial economy are quite complex and it can be tricky to assess or estimate optimal routes/investment.
For a several years (before I had kids), it used to be a Christmas tradition that I replay Transport Tycoon, albeit on modern hardware via this OpenTTD project.
As someone who isn’t personally the biggest fan of this time of year, it did make the Christmas period much more bearable.
But also I have a backlog of games I still need to finish, including ones that scratch a similar itch like Satisfactory and Factorio.
I believe at the time they had like a competition or open entry program to select a few community-created bots to include into the base game. I don't believe I ever mentioned our school thing in their community forums, I probably should have.
TL;DR OpenTTD for education purposes!
Original soundtrack recorded with live instruments. Grooviest thing I've heard in years.
The OPL3 modulates frequencies really well!
Here’s the Transport Tycoon soundtrack as performed by an OPL3 chip. This is objectively the original-original soundtrack. Because this is what I grew up on.
https://www.tt-forums.net/viewtopic.php?t=56778
(It’s cool how it was captured through the S/PDIF port of a SoundBlaster AWE32. It’s a nice little turn of commodity entertainment device market events that gave us that possibility, isn’t it?)
Chris have indeed written the game in Assembly, however, this is just one aspect of the truth. He actually used a kind of higher level generator or macro system for the game. But, still assembly, at the end of the day. Just not written by hand in Notepad, like how CS students do in class. Or was that just me?
If you have 4 real cores, with 2 hyperthreads, the system reports 8 CPUs. But that's fake. Hyperthreads share most of their compute and register resources, so they only work well if a core is spending most of its time waiting. 2 hyperthreads both doing full compute will basically work at half speed each, which is close to what your graph is showing.
BTW, you can check on Linux with this command LANG=C lscpu and checking the Thread(s) per core value
There was only one I could find: "exploring the performance of trAIns". I looked at the "trAIns" link and cannot understand what it does, other than being GPL licensed.
It's all very cryptic, without any explanations. To me that stands for "if you don't know already, you need not apply". Too bad.
I really don’t miss those days of trying dozens of different autoexec.bat / config.sys configurations for each and every game just to get the basics working.
Still an amazing way of preserving Chris Sawyer's genius and naturally expanding on it in a way that isn't insulting to the original, but also keeping it relevant.
(Also, has anyone tried to add some kind of multiplayer to it yet ?)
It is only in hindsight that I now understand what happened there.
I really miss these building games that used an isometric grid. TTD, RC Tycoon, Zoo Tycoon, Sim City, …
Yes, it's less realistic, but it is so pleasant to work with. Everything you build aligns perfectly and if you want, you can neatly fill the entire map.
In comparison, (even with many mods) my Cities Skylines or Planet Coaster creations never look quite right. Building the roads and paths is always awkward and frustrating.
I wish there was more interest in new "simple-grid-based" games.
[1]https://github.com/electronicarts/CnC_Remastered_Collection/...
Not that you'd want to, given that OpenTTD has networked features and you'd want something that makes it easy to validate/isolate remote payloads.
Like I vividly remember Sim City 3000 music as well, but that game was more chill, like a sunny winter day.
TTD was like a spring day where you plan you call the pinkertons to bust some unions while smoking a cigar.
Instead of talking about that, spare a thought for the awful x86 memory segmentation mode[1] --- now that sucked.
>New art is being drawn in the style of the original game, using the original 8bpp palette. The graphics should be a similar but distinct version of the object in question - no graphics may be copied at all from the original. The new sprites do not have to be the same size as the original, but need to be similar so as to fit into the game as expected.
https://wiki.openttd.org/en/Archive/Community/Graphics%20Rep...