OpenTTD 1.0.0 Released 107
Gmer writes "Eming.com reports that OpenTTD, the open source clone of the Microprose game Transport Tycoon Deluxe, has reached a milestone. OpenTTD 1.0.0 has been released 6 years after work started on the first version, with the help of hundreds of contributors and thousands of testers/players. Over 30 language translations are considered complete, and OpenTTD is available for *BSD, Linux, Solaris and Windows. OpenTTD is a business simulation game in which the player is in control of a transport company and can compete against rival companies to make as much profit as possible by transporting passengers and various goods by road, rail, sea or air."
It's a great way to pass the time (Score:2, Informative)
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My wife says no more toys for me; however the argument for an N900 is getting ever stronger. (I'm saving my pennies for whatever follows the n900).
Thanks for this most-valuable information AC.
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"(I'm saving my pennies for whatever follows the n900)."
It's already been released. It's called the iPhone. ;-)
A lot of people... (Score:1)
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Actually, it looks more like Transport Tycoon Deluxe.
DND (Score:1)
Dear Overlord of Cargo Transport,
I don't have time for your pathetic versioning proposals! (My south-western 6-line maglev connection is filled with stuck trains!)
Is the AI any better? (Score:3, Informative)
Last time I played OpenTTD (a couple years ago), I found it entertaining for a while, but not challenging. The AI didn't present much competition, and I got the impression the game wasn't designed with that in mind. It seemed like it's a game for people who like playing with model trains.
Re:Is the AI any better? (Score:5, Informative)
A while ago they added NoAI which allowed for user coded AIs. Several of these user coded AIs are quite good and certianly much much better than the original.
http://www.tt-forums.net/viewforum.php?f=65 [tt-forums.net]
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I've been playing against AdmiralAI for a bit and although I don't agree with *some* of the choices it makes, it is definitely leaps and bounds ahead of the AI I fondly remember from the 486 days.
Then again, I'm far too fond of trains myself, so far all I know it's actually outsmarting me and I'm wasting heaps of cash on something that just isn't worth it ;-)
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....and I'm wasting heaps of cash on something that just isn't worth it ;-)
Like building and maintaining a steam line in 2040? :D (Guilty as charged, your honor!)
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I'm VERY impressed if they've coded it to draw additional tourist passengers based on the effect of anachronisticity(sp!), instead of, say, shoving those passengers into the much cheaper and faster transport in the adjacent tile! Now THAT'S thorough... :-p
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It is open source, so if it isn't, you could perhaps add some of your tricks and make it smarter
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Not everybody is a programmer.
Everybody is a programmer, just not necessarily a computer programmer.
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Computer literacy is not the same as being a competent programmer any more than English literacy is the same as being a novelist.
Try not to get ahead of yourself.
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I run it @ 1920x1200 on a machine with similar specs to those you listed, runs just fine.
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Exactly what I was thinking myself. Runs fine here.
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1680*1050 here without a hitch...with 2 EVE Online clients and 2 flash games actively running in the background.
I don't know what, but there's *something* you're doing wrong.
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openTTD supports custom AI's written in the scripting language Squirrel. See http://wiki.openttd.org/Noai [openttd.org] . There's a quite few AI's to download, of varying quality and personality.
The original (now removed) AI did indeed suck badly, but it's stupidity did provide players with some amusement at the same time. ;)
Re:Is the AI any better? (Score:4, Informative)
This gallery have some examples of TTD AI stupidity [nylon.net].
Have a explanation why the orginal AI is poor [i-want-a-website.com], note that the "glitches, cheats and bugs" mentioned in the FAQ have been fixed in openTTD since a long time ago. ;)
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Good luck writing a heuristic that takes into account your ability to modify the terrain that you are pathfinding over.
But yes, most if not all the replacement AIs use A* in some form.
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Well, the first idea that comes to mind is having a 3D grid with greater costs for those routes that need to be offset vertically from where the ground is now, and making sure that only such routes are valid that do not offset more than by +1/-1 per horizontal move.
Of course this may screw up A*/Dijkstra's "edge" nodes' ideas of their route costs when a nearby route decides to start modifying terrain... hmm.
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What's the problem with that? It just means the search space is comprised of some possible terrain with opportunity cost values instead of a fixed grid with straightforward build or movement cost values. Have you thought about this problem more or less than me?
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You have to keep in mind of the system requirements at the time too. Originally Transport Tycoon was coded to run on 486 computers. While they vastly improved the pathfinding of both networks and AI's with A*, I'm not even sure if it would work as well on the old 486 computers the game was originally made for (Amusingly, some of the largest rail networks in openTTD slows even down the fastest computers).
I don't know the computational powers needed for A* (other than it majorily increased openTTD system requ
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It's mainly a memory cost. The performance cost of A* is less than most other pathfinders.
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I see. But I seem to recall there was (or just has been) a large RAM shortage around the time (1994) Transport Tycoon was released. :)
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So IMHO openttd doesn't really shine as a competitive game, what's FAR more fun is trying to build crazy-ass HUUUUUUUUGGGE networks. Check out some of t
Re:Is the AI any better? (Score:5, Insightful)
The AI received a major upgrade recently, which allows for different AIs that each behave differently. Personally, I prefer playing without AIs and simply enjoy building a transport network as complete as possible. Everyone who plays the game enjoys it for their own reason, but when you consider that the game that OpenTTD is based on [wikipedia.org] was released in 1994 and that (a) people are still playing it and (b) that a 6 year old project to update it is still going strong - well, that alone should tell you that there's something about this game that's pretty damn good.
Re:Is the AI any better? (Score:4, Informative)
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Simutrans is my favorite game currently. The list of transit possibilities is so long, and trolleybuses were included with the standard distribution sometime between version 99 and version 100. They're great for many purposes, especially since they don't slow down on hills.
The real challenge is yourself (Score:3, Insightful)
Looking at the screenshots, I think some players approached this game differently then I did. For me the challenge was not the insane AI, but trying to create a maximum efficiency rail network. Getting the most goods transport, with as few trains with as little track as possible.
This game is closer the Sims and Sim City in that there is no AI to beat. The spiritual succesor of Roller Coaster tycoon makes this bloody clear by removing the AI altogether.
When you managed to pump up a city from nothing to a t
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You can now disable buying exclusive transport rights in the options.
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Looking back (Score:1, Interesting)
I was 14 when the original came out, and one of my friends had it. God we had no fucking clue what we were doing.
Going back to games that crushed my spirit as a kid is so vindicating.
Re:Looking back (Score:5, Interesting)
I remember back in 1994 or so on my first computer when I got a demo of Transport Tycoon from some British UK magazine we imported. You were only limited to few (five?) years of building and I had no idea what to do. I later got the very first original version of Transport Tycoon, the one with the real vehicle names, I honestly don't remember much what I did with that version.
I then got the Transport Tycoon Plus version, the one with the "mars terrain" as alternate graphics. I remember spending most of my childhood with that version, looking at envy at the "Deluxe" version which had maglev and one-way signals. You can bet I was happy when I eventually got the deluxe version, and I thought anything was possible with one-way signals... I had no idea about pre-signals or path signals yet. ;) I used TTDPatch to run Windows TTD under Win XP, then later got openTTD 0.3.x. That's when I was hooked again. One of the best things with openTTD compared to TTD or even TTDPatch is a fully working multiplayer. In both TTD and orginal transport tycoon, you were lucky if the game went past thirty years as it desynced very easily. OpenTTD is much more stable in that degree, and fails more gracefully if it does desyncs (which is rare, and the orginal versions would just crash or glitch up).
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A bunch of volunteers fixed a lot of the big bugs, but because there was no developer that could make the commitment to be the maintainer of the port, they decided to drop support. If you checkout the source and install two little C libraries into /usr/local, you can still compile and run it on OS X.
There are also a few people that are distributing their various OS X compilations. I seem to remember that near the end of the tt-forums thread on the dropping of Mac support, there is a link.
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You just described my experience almost exactly - substitute PC World as the magazine that the free sample diskette came with (IIRC). I remember playing TTDLX versus my brothers over a null-modem cable before we had the thinnet network set up in the basement. (to counter the usual /. stereotypes: I was a kid at the time - I moved out of my parents' house after college when I got married, and I never actually lived in the basement)
Not only for nerds? (Score:1, Informative)
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For OpenTTD you can use the original Transport Tycoon Deluxe data files (you need to own a Transport Tycoon Deluxe CD). There are also the free alternatives OpenGFX (graphics), OpenSFX (sound) and OpenMSX (music) which can be installed automatically by the Windows installer.
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Or you could just use a package manager like everybody else. If your distro is consistently slow to package things, consider another distro*. It would seem that Gentoo has had it since 2004.
http://maemo.org/downloads/product/Maemo5/openttd/ (Score:1)
I have been playing openTTD a bit with my n900. Works very well with the stylus except for one thing: I can't scroll the map. Only the world under the map scrolls and to set the map to new location one has to close and reopen it. I suppose it has something to do with not being able to send left mouse button signal but so far I have not been able to figure it out.
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So closed source is so much better? Go back to playing Duke Nukem Forever then.
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Freeciv 1.0 was released 1996, so no this is not the first "open source clone" to reach 1.0.
And then you have games like Nethack that's been worked on since the 80's and is a timeless jewel and that nice turnbased medieval strategy game I forgot the name of. I am a huge gamer and I mostly play commercial games (Team Fortress 2 being my current favorite), but I wouldn't sneeze at the open source games.
Keep in mind that generally, open source projects only reach version 1.0 when a major milestone have been re
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that nice turnbased medieval strategy game I forgot the name of
Battle for Wesnoth probably?
Me, I'm waiting eagerly for open Heroes of Might and Magic 3 engine...but it seems somebody is working at most on HoMM2 :/ (oh well, it will be a good starting porting presumably)
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Indeed - commercial projects suffer from "version number" inflation much higher than open source. OpenTTD could have simply made every release a full version release instead of a point release, and be on say, version 10 by now.
It's not uncommon for earlier versions of commercial products to be rather unusable (e.g., DirectX didn't become viable until version 5 or later; or the first versions of the Windows GUI). Then there's the skipping of versions (e.g., Windows NT starting at 3.5; or OS X simply starting
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Although the OpenTTD code has been excellent for some time, I think this is the first version that's actually had a full set of graphics to go with it - with previous versions it required a copy of the original TTD graphics files.
Version 1.0 fits well because this is the first complete version of the game.
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Indeed. After you been spoiled with various custom trainsets (UKRS, NARS, 2CC, the upcoming PJ1K) industries (FIRS is very promising), aircraft (AV8), ships (FISH) and road vehicles (eGRVTS), it's really hard to go back to the original vehicles. Most of the custom stuff feels more balanced (Aircrafts/trains are somewhat less profitable, road/ships are more profitable) and more interesting (with the default vehicles you always just pick the fastest vehicle for your line...).
The only bad thing with those sets
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I rarely play a game without UKRS, AV8 or eGRVTS any more, they're just so much better than the default vehicles. I haven't really tried FISH, I'll have to give it a go.
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Once again OSS proves that it doesn't have an original thought
OSS is not a single entity. There are lots of different OSS developers in the world, with their own goals. One of the points of OSS is that you can take an existing program and extend or modify it to better suit your needs. The original Transport Tycoon was not Free Software, so this was not possible, but it was clearly something that people wanted to do. They wanted to do it so much that they rewrote the original game from scratch. Other games, like FreeCiv, FreeCol, LinCity
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If you want to try some fun and original games, take a look at something like Battle for Wesnoth or Vega Strike.
Wesnoth is a clone, though. So... horrible example.
The problem is that the games that people hype up are all clones: OpenTTD, FreeCIV, Wesnoth, Frozen Bubble, the various Quake III clones around. If you want people to start believing that open source can produce original games, start dropping the names of some original games, guys!
I haven't played Vega Strike, so I can't speak for it.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warlords_(game_series) [wikipedia.org]
The entire time I played Wesnoth (which wasn't that long, because I don't think it's all that great, but I digress), I was thinking nothing but: Warlords II, Warlords II, Warlords II.
It might be "loosely inspired" by Master of Monsters, but it's definitely "firmly inspired" by the Warlords series. If you call that "in an existing genre", then so be it, but I'm classifying it as "clone."
In any case, when people say "original game," I think it's safe to say t
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What about Nethack? It's probably still one of the more original Roguelikes out there, with a long legacy. :) I believe some "original commercial" games was actually inspired by Nethack.
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That's it? That's all you got? That's pathetic.
Nobody even likes that game, except about 15 Slashdotters who think it's the best thing ever-- normal people have either not heard of it, or stopped playing once they realized it takes three weeks to learn it's godawful UI alone.
What commercial games did it influence? Off the top of my head I can think of... maybe... Dungeon Hack and Mission: Thunderbolt. Assuming those games were influenced by it, they're different enough that they're probably just in the same
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I like Nethack, thank you very much. It's steep learning curve is part of the charm, and the fact that lots of things can kill you. It's not a game for the impatient.
You might want to check out the Diablo series. Blizzard themselves admitted that they were inspired by Nethack (and Angband) when they made Diablo, AFAIK people still play it and is very hyped for Diablo III.
If you want to see popular games with awful UI, you might want to check Dwarf Fortress. Manages to be way worse than Nethack (with even st
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I like Nethack, thank you very much. It's steep learning curve is part of the charm, and the fact that lots of things can kill you. It's not a game for the impatient.
I know *you* do, that wasn't my point. My point was that most people do. Most people? The thing you just described? That's not fun.
You might want to check out the Diablo series. Blizzard themselves admitted that they were inspired by Nethack (and Angband) when they made Diablo, AFAIK people still play it and is very hyped for Diablo III.
Diablo'
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Call me evil but... (Score:5, Funny)
Better yet was the opportunity for murder. Run your highspeed trains back and forth over their truck / bus roads, wiping them out. You could even create train disasters by running a line to one end of their stations, wait for their fully laden trains to arrive and then set your own train off to crash into them. Puts them out of business in no time...
Re:Call me evil but... (Score:4, Funny)
..or building a tunnel under the entire terrain, which cost so much it overflowed the signed register, and ended up giving you a few billion dollars..
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I think this only worked in the original Transport Tycoon, not in the Deluxe version.
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You didn't even need to run over all their road vehiches. At least in the original TTD, these accidents cause the company's service rating in that town to plummet, so it would get less cargo than competing companies.
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(Open)TTD focuses its scope on trains: road/sea/air transport exist, but the main thrust is rail.
Remarkably, while the signaling dynamics are incredibly intricate (most 'real world' rail systems can be duplicated), for those who aren't trainspotters, or don't have days to burn on one single section of rail, simple signalling is still possible, and quite easy to roll in.
There are literally scores of sites a google-hop away explaining all sorts of systems, from one-to-one single and dual gauge systems, right
Best game ever (Score:1)
cargo-dest/passanger-dest (Score:3, Interesting)
this gives the game much more depth
http://wiki.openttd.org/Passenger_and_cargo_destinations [openttd.org]
One of the best (Score:2)
I've spent several hours/days as a kid playing Transports Tycoon. Then, several years later, I've spent several hours/days as an adult playing OpenTTD.
When I discovered OpenTTD back in 2006 or 2007 I remember I was so thrilled I didn't sleep that night - played all night long.
Transports Tycoon is probably the most overlooked game. It should be right there, next to SimCity. To be honest, I spent much more time playing (Open)TTD than SimCity. Everyone should give it a try - the multiplayer is awesome.