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Railroad Tycoon II

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Re: Railroad Tycoon II

#71

Post by BlueTemplar »

pjmlp wrote: post #50
freedomben wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. I actually think it might be too late at this point since it takes so long to turn the aircraft carrier. Microsoft can't realistically deprecate/remove Win32, so all they could do is entice with new APIs. That will work for some games, but especially with the frameworks in place, they'll have to be really good to get people to abandon Steam Deck compatibility to use them.

They already control enough studios, PC and XBox market. SteckDeck compatibility relies on "emulating" Windows ecosystem. Remember DR-DOS, OS/2 and EEE PC.

EEE PC was tiny, IBM (OS/2) were full of hubris, what happened to DR-DOS ?

Valve is neither tiny, nor does seem to be under the thrall of hubris. Also Microsoft seems complacent so far, though that might change.

Re: Railroad Tycoon II

#72

Post by [deleted] »

pjmlp wrote: post #48
InsideOutSanta wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a good chance that if that if Microsoft doesn't act soon enough, and a lot more devices running Steam OS are released, Proton might become the de-facto platform against which many new games are developed, and which engines target. At that point, there is nothing Microsoft can do.

Microsoft controls Windows and DirectX, Valve only gets to play until Windows landlord allows it. DR-DOS, OS/2 and EEE PC. Lets see if SteamOS makes the list as well, this is after all round two, Steam Machines didn't go that well.

[deleted]

Re: Railroad Tycoon II

#73

Post by kbolino »

Yeul wrote: post #58
pjmlp wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft controls Windows and DirectX, Valve only gets to play until Windows landlord allows it. DR-DOS, OS/2 and EEE PC. Lets see if SteamOS makes the list as well, this is after all round two, Steam Machines didn't go that well.

Microsoft tried to put their games on their own store but they crawled back to Steam. Honestly Windows is more open than MS haters give it credit for.

Yeah, GFWL was a debacle that has thankfully been largely forgotten. If Microsoft couldn't pull it off back then, they're not going to today.

Re: Railroad Tycoon II

#74

Post by BlueTemplar »

jandrese wrote: post #67
pjmlp wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Naturally it means GNU/Linux will never improve until being forced upon.

It just means Microsoft has put more emphasis on ABI compatibility. This makes sense. In the open source world ABI compatibility is less of an issue because you can just recompile if there are breaking changes. ABI compatibility is far more important in a commercial closed source context where the source may be lost forever when a company shuts down or discontinues a product line.

It would be really nice to see open source being more widespread in games, though of course it's harder because they are more art than software.

Splitting code and audiovisual assets might work ?

Re: Railroad Tycoon II

#75

Post by legitster »

rrr_oh_man wrote: post #27
legitster wrote: post #2

> 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…

> and has yet to find a spiritual successor in my heart OpenTTD, Simutrans?

RRT2 focused much more on business and economics and less on routing puzzles and micromanagement. OpenTTD is good but very... sterile.

Re: Railroad Tycoon II

#76

Post by kbolino »

pjmlp wrote: post #50
freedomben wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. I actually think it might be too late at this point since it takes so long to turn the aircraft carrier. Microsoft can't realistically deprecate/remove Win32, so all they could do is entice with new APIs. That will work for some games, but especially with the frameworks in place, they'll have to be really good to get people to abandon Steam Deck compatibility to use them.

They already control enough studios, PC and XBox market. SteckDeck compatibility relies on "emulating" Windows ecosystem. Remember DR-DOS, OS/2 and EEE PC.

They bought a lot of companies and are doing their level best at running them into the ground. Xbox is a dying platform. They may try some things that they've tried before (GFWL) but they're not going to succeed this time either.

Kernel-level anti-cheat is a bigger threat to gaming on Linux than anything Microsoft has directly done, but even that is fixable.

Re: Railroad Tycoon II

#77

Post by pantalaimon »

freedomben wrote: post #40
ylee wrote: post #8

I 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…

What a shame, GOG only has the Windows version :-( I'd love to buy the linux native version.

You probably don't, the old linux binaries are notoriously hard to get to function properly on a modern distribution.

While the kernel interface remained stable across all those years, user space libraries have changed quite a lot, so it's much easier to run the Windows version with wine.

Re: Railroad Tycoon II

#78

Post by legitster »

mywittyname wrote: post #64
infecto wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The stock management portion of the game adds a lot of depth. Strategy-wise, RTII is pretty simple still - a simple line between two reasonably sized cities will be profitable, so long as you keep the number of lines between the two low enough. But they can be more profitable if you're smart about which cities are connected. But trying to acquire the entire company is actually pretty difficult. You can buy stock on m…

> Strategy-wise, RTII is pretty simple still - a simple line between two reasonably sized cities will be profitable

I would disagree. On hard enough difficulties intercity traffic is too seasonal. Also, continued traffic to the same city decreases the value of goods shipped there. So you still have to do some fussy industry routing as well to usually succeed. You're also racing against opponents to beat them to connecting to major cities.

It's not necessarily rocket science, but it's an enjoyable enough puzzle in it's own right.

Re: Railroad Tycoon II

#79

Post by jandrese »

BlueTemplar wrote: post #74
jandrese wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It just means Microsoft has put more emphasis on ABI compatibility. This makes sense. In the open source world ABI compatibility is less of an issue because you can just recompile if there are breaking changes. ABI compatibility is far more important in a commercial closed source context where the source may be lost forever when a company shuts down or discontinues a product line.

It would be really nice to see open source being more widespread in games, though of course it's harder because they are more art than software. Splitting code and audiovisual assets might work ?

Even then the rights get dicey when they include third party libraries and development systems. Doom famously had issues with the sound library they used.

Plus, with commercial software it often happens that the code only builds cleanly on one specific ancient version of a closed source compiler in a specifically tweaked build environment that has been lost to the ages. Having the source helps a lot, but it is not a panacea.

Re: Railroad Tycoon II

#80

Post by legitster »

ryandrake wrote: post #41
mrighele wrote: post #33

> Indeed, in some of the most difficult scenarios, the efficient operation of your railroad provides no more than the seed capital for the real key to victory, your shenanigans on the stock market. This is in fact what I don't like about RR2. The stock market had too much of a big part in my opinion, and I never enjoyed it. I liked much more Transport Tycoon (and its open source version OpenTTD) which had much more f…

This is the same problem with the more recent Offworld Trading Company game. You can take a half an hour building a great colony, harvesting all the resources, building all of the goods, and so on, but none of it really matters. The end game takes about 60-120 seconds and it's all trading on the in-game stock market, resulting in a sudden "you lost" screen popping up even if you did everything else right in the first…

I would argue that OTC without a stock market is barely a game - it would just a race for resources.

IMHO the problem with OTC is that there is not enough opportunity for financial shenanigans. If someone successfully corners the market on the right commodity, there's a runaway leader problem with not much you can do. The game wrapping up early is a grace in those situations.

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