OpenTTD

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In 1994, Transport Tycoon was released by Microprose after being developed by Chris Sawyer. In 1995, an upgraded version was released called Transport Tycoon Deluxe. This is not that game.

In 1996, Josef Drexler released the first version of TTDPatch, a program designed to patch Transport Tycoon Deluxe when you launched the game, to allow heavy changes to the game without breaking copyright laws.

By the middle of the Turn of the Millennium, TTDPatch was really starting to show its age. Despite amazing improvements to the game, the loophole which made the process legal restricted what could and couldn't be done, so work was started by the community on TT-Forums on a game called "Transport Empire" that was intended to replace TTDPatch to some degree. This is not that either.

OpenTTD is a business management simulation game based very heavily on Transport Tycoon Deluxe.

A screenshot of unmodded OpenTTD.

It was programmed in C by Ludvig Strigeus starting in 2003, and released the first version in March of 2004 to much surprise (you had to be deep into the community to notice it was being developed, due to the aforementioned "Transport Empire" being years away from completion but considered to be the most likely way to successfully move forward from TTDPatch at the time), eventually undergoing a conversion to C++ from 2007 onwards. After 20+ years of development, OpenTTD is still going strong, however the "bleeding edge" is the JGRPP fork (Jonathan G. Rennison's Patch Pack) that has been outpacing the primary branch in new features since it was first released in mid-August of 2015.

As in the official games by Chris Sawyer, the apparent object of the games is to end up with a monopoly of transport services for a usually randomly generated map. Transport is provided in all major modes; air, rail, road, and water, though the most profit tends to come from rail and then air. This is often thrown out the window in favor of making extremely efficient rail super-networks, or just building a train set out of the map for your own enjoyment. Oh, and there's multiplayer too.

OpenTTD was established around the same time as the less-remembered official pseudo-sequel Locomotion, and unlike the latter, is still going strong (tropes exclusive to OpenTTD and the JGR Patch Pack version of it are both listed on this page).

Compare and contrast N.I.M.B.Y. Rails, Simutrans, Mashinky, Voxel Tycoon, Railroad Tycoon, Industry Giant, Sweet Transit, Railgrade, Cities in Motion, Soviet Republic, Transport General, Chris Sawyer's Locomotion, and the Train Fever games, all of which focus solely or significantly on vehicular logistics.

Also compare and contrast A Train, Sim City, Cities Skylines, Theme Park and Theme Hospital, Software Inc., Roller Coaster Tycoon, Parkitect, and Power to the People, games with similar interfaces but a different industry or purpose to focus on.

Contrast Factorio and Satisfactory, which both have comparably complex rail, air, seaport and road infrastructure but also a scope well beyond logistical entrepreneurship.

Not to be confused with OpenGFX/OpenSFX/OpenMSX (which are the base graphic/sound effect/music sets available, see below), ChatGPT, OpenXR or OpenSea.

OpenTTD uses a lot of "tricks" to make modding relatively easy for the end user, but these have a drawback in that there is an overly complex ecosystem of game mods instead of simply files to download and use...

• "NewGRFs" are what people typically think when they hear "game mod". You can program most new content using NML (NewGRF Meta Language, a custom programming language based on XML). These can be downloaded from the game's built-in downloader (which connects to a community-run content server and downloads content in compressed .tar files) or downloaded as files with the .grf format.
  • Unlike many communities, the OpenTTD community takes piracy of NewGRFs very seriously. The irony of this being the case for an "open source" game made by reverse-engineering a copyrighted work is not always lost, but two bad apples and a few other community incidents have led to strict enforcement of licensing of graphics (even though the code cannot be copyrighted as OpenTTD has a GPL v2 license on its own code).
• "Base Sets" are like NewGRFs, but serve as the basic landscape tiles and vehicle graphics. Since OpenTTD was written as a remake of Transport Tycoon Deluxe, and the original version required the graphic files of the original game to run, it was a very important legal priority to create a non-pirated graphics set before someone tried to sue them. Fortunately, this was completed in the form of the base sets before such a thing happened, which are 1:1 replacements of all graphics, music and sound effects in the game with community-made replacements.
  • Because base sets must be able to be downloaded on first run or included with the game itself, all base sets are licensed under GPL v2. Fortunately this means there is not nearly so much drama compared to making NewGRFs.
• "Game Scripts" provide custom game modes. These are also found via the content downloader.
• Because the original Transport Tycoon Deluxe competitor AI was a cheating bastard and a hilariously incompetent transportation engineer, as of 2023 OpenTTD uses the "NoAI" system. This allows customized, community-made AIs to flourish, however many AIs in the in-game content downloader are no longer maintained or working.
• Finally, OpenTTD diverges heavily from Transport Tycoon due to added features, and the recent addition of such features as Custom Train Stations from NewGRFs, Canals and Locks, Drive-Through Road Stops for buses/trucks and trams, Railtypes, NewObjects, NotRoadTypes, Custom Drive-Through Roadstops has made that only more so. However, such extensive features can only be added through extensive programming effort in the form of "Patches". Unlike a patch for fixing bugs, a feature patch (actual name) does what you expect but can only be applied to one version of the game (usually the latest nightly at the time), making them essentially useless unless accepted by the official version's developer team because they won't be maintained as part of the game's code updates.
  • As stated above, the fix for this was "Patch Packs" like JGR's Patch Pack, which allow more patches to be tested by wider audiences without requiring upstream (official version) code changes.

Tropes used in OpenTTD include:

• Acceptable Breaks From Reality:
  • The effects of events like World War Two or the 1970s oil crisis on the economy are completely absent.
    • Except for transport infrastructure and cities, technology does not advance in a vanilla game. Coal power plants and asphalt roads are used from 1950 to 2050, and changing the start date to any point before 1950 or playing beyond 2050 will not change the industries available or the road surface quality.
  • Unless you downloaded a NewGRF to provide new aircraft, the available helicopters, which are quite useful for delivering mail and passengers in big cities, basically cease to exist after 2020. To be fair, the base set only provides three models of helicopter (one in Toyland) and as of this writing it's currently December of 2023 so even IRL there's not much new in the helicopter market since 2020.
  • The only road vehicles you will ever see are busses, trucks and trams. Apparently the worlds of OpenTTD banned cars, instead of creating the slur-inspired term "Jaywalking" and then using cars as an excuse to discriminate against minorities who could only afford transit tickets when building highways.
    • Averted if you download a NewGRF that provides cars as "busses" (sometimes just as a free road vehicle without any cargo room that costs nothing to have wandering around aimlessly) and select an AI opponent which is designed to only build vehicles with no cargo or passenger capacity and a $0 price tag to roam the roads aimlessly forever.
  • Happens a lot even with mods. The hyperloop is apparently viable, the last ships ever built are some very odd-looking vessels from the canals of Mars that are introduced at least 5 years before The New Twenties, and conveyor belts and oil pipelines are types of roads.
• Adam Smith Hates Your Guts: The prices eventually rise so high that a piece of road costs more than a skyscraper in real life.
  • Averted if you change the settings to disable inflation.
    • Subverted in JGRPP, if you change the settings to only disable inflation after a specified year is reached.
• An Entrepreneur Is You
• Artificial Stupidity: The AI in early versions was less insane in OpenTTD than in Transport Tycoon Deluxe, though it's still a pushover. It's since been Dummied Out in favor of the ability to use AIs programmed by community members, with varying degrees of competency depending on the AI (or AIs) you select.
• Artistic License Physics: Trains can go around extremely tight corners at 300mph, but immediately slow down to a crawl when encountering a tiny hill. Only the OpenTTD implementation finally added a (more) realistic acceleration model.
  • Averted if you enable realistic acceleration in the settings. More so if you enable realistic braking as well.
• Awesome but Impractical:
  • Can happen with mod combinations that were never balanced against each other.
  • Aircraft. There is no doubt that they are awesomely cool and fast, but their low cargo capacity and need for expensive airport infrastructure makes them less useful, and by default all planes travel at 1/4 listed speed while trains, road vehicles and ships do not have this handicap. Fortunately, this is purely for game balance on the default 256 by 256 tile map and applies equally to AI aircraft. In addition...
• Awesome Yet Practical:
  • Aircraft, if you use a big map and set plane speed to 1:1. Because most NewGRFs add real vehicles and the Base Sets use off-brand versions of real vehicles.
    • Especially so for the Concorde Yate Haugan and the Dinger 1000
  • Trains. Road vehicles are next to useless on longer distances, as they're slower and can't keep up with increasing cargo rates.
• Bizarrchitecture: Some of the "future" (past 1990 or the Transport Tycoons Gold Mars climate) buildings and vehicles are really odd looking.
  • One mod has a "Museum of Modern Art" shaped like an MC Escher optical illusion triangle.
• Boring but Practical:
  • Ships. They're slow and if there's land in the way and you can't landscape in a small sea strait, using them with canals that slow them down even further are the expensive and only option, but if you need to move a lot of cargo and you need to do it over a large body of water, they are also your best option.
  • Road Vehicles. Busses cannot be beat if you want to start small or boost a city's growth for your major stations, while trucks are great for shipping small loads of cargo between two nearby industries.
• Color-Coded for Your Convenience: All companies have a single, associated colour, but Open TTD allows you to subvert this, letting you choose different colours for different vehicles (e. g. different colours for steam, diesel, and electric locomotives) as long as the combo chosen for that vehicle type hasn't been used by another company.
  • Averted in JGRPP if you give a specific vehicle group a unique color set.
• Cool Plane: Several. The Yate Haugan stands out, even though it looks like a burning hang-glider when breaking down. Also the Guru Galaxy - and expy of the Lockheed TriStar. The Dinger 1000 is oddly menacing-looking too.
• Cool Train: Of course.
• Crapsack World: Intercity transport is controlled solely by private companies who compete with each other to the point of sabotage and bribery. Also, there are UFOs and X-COM is canon.
  • The Wasteland climate NewGRF, complete with ramshackle buildings of corrugated steel and the Manpower cargo.
• Crap Saccharine World: Despite the above, pollution, poverty, inequality, climate change and even war do not seem to exist, and nature is spotlessly picturesque regardless of the climate or time or even planet. Either there's some serious hidden censorship in that world, or the most newsworthy events really are horrible and possibly-intentional vehicle crashes.
• Curb Stomp Battle: If an AI competitor is using road vehicles, it's possible to set up a rail line across the road and order a locomotive to "dispose" of AI vehicles. This leaves your reputation intact and leaves the locomotive completely unharmed.
• Difficult but Awesome: Trains. The most complicated transport method to set up initially (especially if you're trying to network all your lines together), but overall the most efficient way to ship non-passenger goods (Planes are best for passengers).
• Easy Logistics: Averted in that vehicles need to be maintained, otherwise they breakdown. Played straight with passenger and cargo; they will go wherever you ship them.
• Game Mod / Fan Remake : Of the Transport Tycoon franchise.
• Genteel Interbellum Setting: The original started in 1930. Deluxe had 1950 as the earliest date. Both of these can be selected as the start date, though for the former you would want to download the [Full Conversion] GRF to actually have the vehicles available.
  • By extension, the game features The Edwardian Era, The Roaring Twenties, The Fifties, The Sixties, The Seventies, The Eighties and The Nineties. However, this being made before the Turn of the Millennium, vehicles starting in 2000 in Transport Tycoon Deluxe and all vehicles in the Mars climate from Transport Tycoon Gold consist of Zeerust such as monorails and supersonic jets.
    • With mods, this is extended to include everything from The Roman Empire to World War I through all the above and moving on to The Turn of the Millennium, The New Tens, The New Twenties, Next Sunday A.D., Twenty Minutes Into the Future, Exty Years From Now, and more of The Future.
• Karma Meter: Crash accidents make your company rating go down. This can be used cleverly to cause trouble for your opposition, however.
• Lawyer-Friendly Cameo / Captain Ersatz : All vehicles from the original 1994 UK installment were real ones from the various eras of the 20th century and all of them used their Real Life names. To avoid potential lawsuits, every vehicle in the US release, and subsequently the Deluxe version (and by extension, OpenTTD) was renamed. For example, a Vickers Viscount is a "Coleman Count", a Boeing 747 is a "Darwin 300", the Lockheed Tristar becomes the "Guru galaxy", all planes of the Airbus brand are called "Airtaxi", and the Concorde is referred to as a "Yate Haugan".
• Made of Explodium: When two vehicles or convoys collide (except the train in a road/train collision), the vehicles will explode into a fireball. This occurs even if the vehicles aren't carrying flammables of any type, such as an electric passenger train crashing into another electric passenger train.
• Level Ate / Toy Time: The "Toyland" climate. Most of the fandom dislikes it for this reason.
• Not Playing Fair with Resources: Has an in-universe/meta example in planes, which are the same speeds for both human and AI but move 1/4 the speed as trains, trucks, busses and ships regardless of the listed speed. This is mainly due to the first airplanes being as fast as the last maglev train when the speed is equal, and is also why its more fun to use the new, much larger map sizes.
• Obstructive Bureaucrat: City and town councils can become this, for better or for worse. Especially if they don't know your company well yet and you start massively altering their surroundings and tearing down older buildings - they'll simply ban you from constructing any of your company's structures on their territory, until you regain your reputation (which can often take years).
• Plot-Driven Breakdown: Every single time a small UFO flies above a bus, they both breakdown at the exact same time and the UFO crashes exactly onto the bus.
• Public Domain Soundtrack: All audio base sets (OpenMSX and OpenSFX, and any alternatives available from the content downloader) are GPL v2. Averted if you use the original OpenTTD music file as a base set.
• Screw the Rules, I Have Money/Bribing Your Way to Victory: If you've run out of town-owned tiles to plant trees and they're still not happy, you can bribe the town's officials to increase your rating by one level, at high risk of getting run out of town on your own railroad for a few years.
• Shout-Out / Easter Egg : Every now and then, an X-COM fighter jet or UFO will appear and fly around the map.
• "Stop Having Fun!" Guys: It's a Chris Sawyer game. He has issues with people modding the game to make it more of a sandbox.
  • Unfortunately this is also true of some very talented but otherwise very self-serving individuals who make or made mods for the game, leave over petty disputes, and then made it as hard as possible for anyone to fix bugs when the mod no longer functions. No names, please.
• Suicide Mission: As detailed below, this is a perfectly reasonable way of dealing with competitors.
• Units Not to Scale:
  • Ships are not much bigger than train cars. In reality, cargo ships carry hundreds of containers which are as big as train cars. Also, each tile is about 600km. You can build trains that take up more than 7 tiles.
    • Averted to varying degrees with NewGRFs. SHARK and Unsinkable Sam (the two most popular ship mods as of 2023) have a good balance that makes it more believable.
  • The largest jetliners look like they have cabins too small for the equivalent capacity of Borrowers, let alone the same size passengers riding in the busses. Worse, unlike with ships, plane sprites aren't allowed to be big enough for the world's largest airplane to fit within the bounding boxes that are nearly hard-coded into the game engine.
• Video Game Caring Potential: Want to try and nurse mainline steam traction into the 21st century? Now's your chance. Think that town in particular needs some help with their economic growth, even if it's a loss leader? Go for it.
• Video Game Cruelty Potential:
  • It's possible to cause the deaths of thousands of people in one go by judicious use of the "Ignore signal" button.
  • It takes a little time to set up, but if you have created cities directly at sea level, only protected by a dike, and then delete the dike, the city will be overrun by the water and destroyed.
    • There is a map in Transport Tycoon Deluxe called "Damn!" where the entire map is at sea level and protected by a dike.
  • You can take revenge on the computer-favoured AI opponents' badly built railways by building a railway depot at the end of their stations and sending a steam engine of yours running kamikaze-style into the opponent's station. His train eventually enters the station and...
• Video Game Time: A day passes every few seconds, so trains take weeks to travel from one town to another. Because of this, we have the oddity that passengers will pay through the the nose for the privilege of traveling a couple of miles in "only" ten days.
  • In JGRPP, this can be averted by changing the right settings (the ones related to ticks per day, ticks per minute, display timetable in minutes, and day length factor), however, due to it being more than one setting, the way to do so feels... less than ideal.
    • The game has an almost zen-like, Animal Crossing-esque feel to it if you set one year in-game to pass by every 24 hours, making a year-long game that is 365+ in-game years long a potential extended playstyle.