OpenTTD: Difference between revisions
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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 [https://www.tt-forums.net/ TT-Forums] on a game called "[[Vaporware|Transport Empire]]" that was intended to replace TTDPatch to some degree. [[Running Gag|This is not that either]].
'''''OpenTTD''''' is a [[Space Management Game|business management]] [[Simulation Game|simulation game]] based very heavily on ''[[Transport Tycoon Deluxe]]''. 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 [[The New Twenties|20+ years]] of development, OpenTTD is still going strong, however the "bleeding edge" is the JGRPP fork ([[Fun with Acronyms|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. [[Wide Open Sandbox|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 [[Color-Coded Multiplayer|there's multiplayer too]].
''[https://web.archive.org/web/20131103193923/http://www.openttd.org/en/ OpenTTD]'' was established around the same time as the less-remembered official [[Spiritual Sequel|pseudo-sequel]] ''[[Locomotion]]'', and unlike the latter, is still going strong (
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]]'', ''[[Locomotion|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), [[A.I. is a Crapshoot|ChatGPT]], [[The Metaverse|OpenXR]] or [[This Is Going to Be Huge|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...
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*** 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
* [[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]]:
* [[Awesome but Impractical]]: Aircraft. There is no doubt that they are [[Cool Plane|awesomely cool]] and fast, but their low cargo capacity and need for expensive airport infrastructure makes them less useful, and by default [[My Rules Are Not Your Rules|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...▼
** Can happen with mod combinations that were never balanced against each other.
▲*
* [[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 [[Bland-Name Product|off-brand versions of real vehicles]].
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* [[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 ''[[
* [[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 [[https://www.tt-forums.net/viewtopic.php?t=39317|TTO Full Conversion]]<ref>If the TTO Full Conversion topic link is dead, see this footnote for backups to the [[https://perma.cc/P7B2-ZWN9|linked]] [[https://perma.cc/FQ7F-UAB7|page]] and [[https://perma.cc/2F5L-CPD5|relevant]] [[https://perma.cc/8P2C-8LCC|files]].</ref> 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. In the [[Spiritual Successor]] ''Locomotion'', which starts in 1900, each time period gets era-appropriate music, Ragtime for 1900-1920, jazz and blues up to the 1950's, and then various forms of rock and roll and so on up through to trance music from the 1990s and [[Turn of the Millennium|early 2000s]].
* [[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 "[[Inherently Funny Words|Yate]] [[Memetic Mutation|Haugan]]".
* [[Made of Explodium]]: When two vehicles or convoys collide ([[Truth In Television|except the train in a road/train collision]]), the [[Every Car is a Pinto|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 [[That One Level|dislikes it]] for this reason.
* [[Not Playing Fair with Resources]]: Has an in-universe/meta example in planes, which are [[Subverted Trope|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. [[Acceptable Breaks From Reality|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 [[Acceptable Breaks From Canon|its more fun to use]] the [[Wide Open Sandbox|new, much larger map sizes]].
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* [[Plot-Driven Breakdown]]: Every single time [[Shout-Out|a small UFO]] flies above a bus, they ''both breakdown at the exact same time'' and the UFO crashes [[Action Bomb|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, [[Nice Job Fixing It, Villain|at high risk of getting run out of town on your own railroad]] for a few years.
* [[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<ref>At TTD's graphical scale, the [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seawise_Giant|Seawise Giant] would be possible but would clip over the edges of canals.</ref>, 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.▼
* [[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 [[Small Name, Big Ego|self-serving]] individuals who make or made mods for the game, [[Green-Eyed Monster|leave over petty disputes]], and then [[No Plans, No Prototype, No Backup|made it as hard as possible for anyone to fix bugs when the mod no longer functions]]. [[Rule of Cautious Editing Judgement|No names, please]].
* [[Suicide Mission]]: As detailed below, this is a [[Crapsack World|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<ref>At TTD's graphical scale, the [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seawise_Giant|Seawise Giant] would be possible but would clip over the edges of canals.</ref>, 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]]:
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* [[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... [[Moon Logic Puzzle|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.
{{reflist}}
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