So many words and not even mentioning RRT3. The successor was a departure in some ways, but so great and dynamic in other ways.
Railroad Tycoon II
21–30 of 176 posts
Re: Railroad Tycoon II
#22I played the Linux version the article mentions while at Goldman Sachs; a colleague on the Red Hat coverage team gave me a boxed copy of Corel Linux including the game. The port ran very well on my Red Hat Linux box at home. In retrospect it was part of a brief flurry of Linux ports of major games. I also got to play Return to Castle Wolfenstein and Neverwinter Nights ; in both cases the publishers made Linux clients…
That reminds me of 1999, where I threw a party to help my friends modify their Celeron 300A CPUs so they could run dual-socket. My dual 300A running at 450MHz would run Starcraft under WINE faster than Windows could run it because at the time Windows couldn't do multi-core. Under Linux one processor would run the graphics (in X) and the other would run the game mechanics, and it would blaze.
Well, just envy hate and just momentarily. Back then, such hacks were harder to find/discover. I would have loved to do that hack, I yearned for true multicpu.
Re: Railroad Tycoon II
#23> In this reviewer’s opinion, it was a sparkling creative success as well as a commercial one, making it all the more deserving of remembrance. We’ve seen a fair number of train games built on similar premises in the years since 1998, but I don’t know that we’ve ever seen a comprehensively better one. RRT2 is my all time favorite game, and has yet to find a spiritual successor in my heart. Alongside Anno 1602, it may…
I need to load this one up again and see how it plays. One of my complaints in most of the train and tycoon style games these days is they are too darn easy from a strategy perspective or they require casts amount of micro managing.
Re: Railroad Tycoon II
#24Is there a board game equivalent? I'd like to play with my kid, without us staring at a screen.
Re: Railroad Tycoon II
#25So many words and not even mentioning RRT3. The successor was a departure in some ways, but so great and dynamic in other ways.
RRT3 economy was great with the addition of the moving of goods outside the rail system it made everything much more organic and realistic as you couldn't just gauge prices anymore
Re: Railroad Tycoon II
#26I played the Linux version the article mentions while at Goldman Sachs; a colleague on the Red Hat coverage team gave me a boxed copy of Corel Linux including the game. The port ran very well on my Red Hat Linux box at home. In retrospect it was part of a brief flurry of Linux ports of major games. I also got to play Return to Castle Wolfenstein and Neverwinter Nights ; in both cases the publishers made Linux clients…
I feel relying on WINE and Proton instead of building a proper GNU/Linux ecosystem will eventually backfire, it didn't happen already because thus far Microsoft chosen to ignore it. However as Steam vs XBox slowly escalates, Microsoft might eventually change their stance on the matter, forcing devs to rely on APIs not easier to copy, free licenses for handhelds, taking all Microsoft owned studios out of Steam, see wh…
Microsoft can't do shit against WINE/Proton legally, as long as either project steers clear of misappropriated source code and some forms of reverse engineering (Europe's regulations are much more relaxed than in the US).
The problem at the core is that Linux (or to be more accurately, the ecosystem around it) lacks a stable set of APIs, or even commonly agreed-upon standards in the first place, as every distribution has "their" way of doing things and only the kernel has an explicit "we don't break userspace" commitment. I distinctly remember a glibc upgrade that went wrong about a decade and a half ago where I had to spend a whole night getting my server even back to usable (thank God I had eventually managed to coerce the system into downloading a statically compiled busybox...).
Re: Railroad Tycoon II
#27> In this reviewer’s opinion, it was a sparkling creative success as well as a commercial one, making it all the more deserving of remembrance. We’ve seen a fair number of train games built on similar premises in the years since 1998, but I don’t know that we’ve ever seen a comprehensively better one. RRT2 is my all time favorite game, and has yet to find a spiritual successor in my heart. Alongside Anno 1602, it may…
OpenTTD, Simutrans?
Re: Railroad Tycoon II
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
I feel relying on WINE and Proton instead of building a proper GNU/Linux ecosystem will eventually backfire, it didn't happen already because thus far Microsoft chosen to ignore it. However as Steam vs XBox slowly escalates, Microsoft might eventually change their stance on the matter, forcing devs to rely on APIs not easier to copy, free licenses for handhelds, taking all Microsoft owned studios out of Steam, see wh…
WINE and Proton piggyback on Microsoft's guarantees of Win32 stability. As long as that remains in place (which should be for all intents and purposes forever given MS's customers) they can't really do anything about it. So, next time you hear the joke about Win32 ABI being the only stable ABI on Linux, remember it's funny because it's true!
If all one wants it to run games that use the Win32 API as defined tomrrow, anyone's guess.
Re: Railroad Tycoon II
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
I feel relying on WINE and Proton instead of building a proper GNU/Linux ecosystem will eventually backfire, it didn't happen already because thus far Microsoft chosen to ignore it. However as Steam vs XBox slowly escalates, Microsoft might eventually change their stance on the matter, forcing devs to rely on APIs not easier to copy, free licenses for handhelds, taking all Microsoft owned studios out of Steam, see wh…
> I feel relying on WINE and Proton instead of building a proper GNU/Linux ecosystem will eventually backfire, it didn't happen already because thus far Microsoft chosen to ignore it. Microsoft can't do shit against WINE/Proton legally, as long as either project steers clear of misappropriated source code and some forms of reverse engineering (Europe's regulations are much more relaxed than in the US). The problem at…
Microsoft can easily do another go at it.
That is the problem building castles on other vendor platforms.
As reminder,
https://www.extremetech.com/gaming/127475-valve-confirms-ste...
Re: Railroad Tycoon II
#30I played the Linux version the article mentions while at Goldman Sachs; a colleague on the Red Hat coverage team gave me a boxed copy of Corel Linux including the game. The port ran very well on my Red Hat Linux box at home. In retrospect it was part of a brief flurry of Linux ports of major games. I also got to play Return to Castle Wolfenstein and Neverwinter Nights ; in both cases the publishers made Linux clients…
I feel relying on WINE and Proton instead of building a proper GNU/Linux ecosystem will eventually backfire, it didn't happen already because thus far Microsoft chosen to ignore it. However as Steam vs XBox slowly escalates, Microsoft might eventually change their stance on the matter, forcing devs to rely on APIs not easier to copy, free licenses for handhelds, taking all Microsoft owned studios out of Steam, see wh…
At that point, there is nothing Microsoft can do.