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Railroad Tycoon II

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Re: Railroad Tycoon II

#91

Post by sho_hn »

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…

I remember Corel Linux!

It was the first Linux I ever used, from a PC magazine CD in 1999. A significantly hacked-up KDE 1.1 w/ integrated Wine. To this day, you can find Corel in the copyright dialogs of a few notable KDE apps, e.g. the file archiver Ark.

I'm now looking back on 25 years of Linux use, 19 of them as a KDE developer, including writing large parts of the Plasma 5/6 shell, 6-7 years on the KDE board, and working on the Steam Deck (which ships with KDE Plasma) at a contractor for a hot minute to bring gaming back as well. At least on the personal level it was an impactful product :-)

Re: Railroad Tycoon II

#92

Post by flohofwoe »

About the only game from the 90s which I still play regularly, IMHO it's pretty close to the perfect computer game since it strikes just the right balance between simulation and 'arcade-y' fun - and all the modern 're-enactments' I tried so far somehow don't manage to capture the essential of what makes Railroad Tycoon 2 so much fun (the Platinum version runs great on modern computers btw: https://store.steampowered.com/app/7620/Railroad_Tycoon_II_P...).

Re: Railroad Tycoon II

#93

Post by sho_hn »

thatjoeoverthr wrote: post #56
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…

I had the box set, it was the first Linux game I bought. The flurry was Loki Games, a porting house. They let me help as a beta tester! I got to test Descent III and Mindrover. Next would have been Deus Ex, but they flamed out. One of them, Sam Latinga, built SDL and I believe is still active.

I think Loki also originated OpenAL, which is still around as well.

Re: Railroad Tycoon II

#94

Post by BlueTemplar »

zem wrote: post #57
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…

one of my all time favourite games too. for me the best aspect was that I felt I was playing out the story of how railroads helped settle a continent, so its spiritual peers were civilisations and to a lesser extent simcity. the closest modern game I've found that captures that same sort of evolving story + open ended management aspect is stellaris.

You might want to look into Shadow Empire (2020), which, among things like wargaming, planetary simulation, roleplaying and leader management, also features a complex logistics system (with also railroads), as well as stock market like trading !

Re: Railroad Tycoon II

#95

Post by zem »

BlueTemplar wrote: post #94
zem wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

one of my all time favourite games too. for me the best aspect was that I felt I was playing out the story of how railroads helped settle a continent, so its spiritual peers were civilisations and to a lesser extent simcity. the closest modern game I've found that captures that same sort of evolving story + open ended management aspect is stellaris.

You might want to look into Shadow Empire (2020), which, among things like wargaming, planetary simulation, roleplaying and leader management, also features a complex logistics system (with also railroads), as well as stock market like trading !

thanks, that does look excellent!

Re: Railroad Tycoon II

#96

Post by zem »

legitster wrote: post #81
kuon wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is a widely different game and theme, but manor lords is very good and has some innovations that reminded me of RRT when it came out. If you like this kind of games I suggest you look at it.

I like Manor Lords. Yeah, I'm a big fan of all of the survivalist city-builders that have come out since Banished (Planetbase, Frostpunk, Timberborn). They don't remind me anything of RRT, lol. But I definitely think they appeal to the same type of gamer.

'against the storm' is an interesting twist on the genre, if you haven't checked that one out yet

Re: Railroad Tycoon II

#97

Post by Lammy »

I also really love this game. It's what originally taught me a lot about the workings of trains, different capabilities of locomotives, the need for sidings due to monetary cost of double-tracking everywhere, etc.

The article mentions the existence of the PSX and Dreamcast ports but does not mention that the DC version is actually re-done in a fully-3D engine as opposed to the traditional approach of the PC version where the 3D models were pre-rendered to 2D graphics covering the multiple angles of rotation. It's one of the Windows CE based Dreamcast games! https://segaretro.org/Windows_CE

Here's a longplay where you can see it: https://youtu.be/a7tgccUpPAc

Re: Railroad Tycoon II

#98

Post by giobox »

olyjohn wrote: post #84
giobox wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also ran a dual Celeron system overclocked to 450mhz - it was great value in 1999. Abit even launched a motherboard that let you run dual Celerons without modifying the processors, the legendary BP6: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ABIT_BP6 This was first board to let you use unmodified Celerons, the "hack" to let dual CPUs work with those chips was performed at the motherboard level, no CPU pin modifications needed.

The real problem with this setup was that a vanilla Pentium 3 would run circles around the dual Celerons. I had my Celerons clocked to something ridiculous at one point like 600MHz and still could not beat the Pentium.

You are forgetting the massive price difference though. For sure a P3 was great if you had an unlimited budget, but a quick look at pricing sheets for September 1999 shows a 600mhz P3 at ~650 dollars.

The 300mhz celerons, easily over-clockable to 450/500mhz, where only ~150 dollars each. These prices are in 1999 dollars too, I haven't adjusted for inflation.

It was the value proposition, not the outright performance that made dual celeron builds attractive, especially in an age where we were having to upgrade far more often than we do today to keep up with latest trends.

In 1999 I vividly remember not being able to afford a P3 build, was largely why I ended up with the BP6. The P3 also had significant supply issues throughout its lifespan, which didn't help pricing at retail either.

Re: Railroad Tycoon II

#99

Post by BlueTemplar »

jandrese wrote: post #79
BlueTemplar wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yet both of these issues seem to plague closed source software more than open source ?

Doom wasn't developed with open source in mind, was it ?

What open source software "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" ?

Re: Railroad Tycoon II

#100

Post by suresk »

So many fond memories of this game - it was a really fun blend of railroad sim and economic sim that I haven't really found since. I'll never forget the "ding ding ding" sound that goes off when a train pulls into a station and earns you a bit of cash!
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