

The Evolution of Roller Coaster Tycoon (1999) - Snail_Commando
http://www.nicscorner.com/evo_of_rct.htm

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fennecfoxen
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

~~~
bane
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.

~~~
M2Ys4U
There are a couple of 'NewGRFs' that can solve some of those problems.

------
Igglyboo
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](http://www.chrissawyergames.com/faq3.htm)

~~~
jwdunne
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.

~~~
Danieru
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/](http://freerct.blogspot.ca/) and the indie
clone:
[http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=39904.0](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.

~~~
jwdunne
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.

------
bmmayer1
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.

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

------
Grum
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

