Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Railroad Tycoon II

filfre.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 176 posts

Re: Railroad Tycoon II

#151

Post by wqaatwt »

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.

Sure, MS could purposefully try and make their first party games not run on Linux.

However.. why? It would be the same as purposefully losing money but not selling on Steam.

Besides that what could they do? Within getting into all types of legal trouble?

Re: Railroad Tycoon II

#152

Post by KronisLV »

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…

> RRT2 is my all time favorite game, and has yet to find a spiritual successor in my heart.

Aside from OpenTTD, the only games that come to mind are more modern in both their looks and how they play, but they might be worth a shot regardless.

Transport Fever (1 and 2) - the first game can be found for cheap, the second game has quite possibly the best UI of any game in the genre, plus you get trains, trucks, boats and planes, large and pretty maps with towns that develop into proper cities over time.

Mashinky - a more grid based game with trains, trucks and planes, as well as an interesting token based economy system, where you unlock new types of resources as you move along within the game world and therefore have to build out your network gradually, ensuring that everything works okay as it scales up.

Train World - a pretty recent game about trains, which has a larger scale than any of the other games I've played in the genre, might need a bit more polish but is pretty promising! It is focused purely on trains though, so is a bit more of a focused experience when it comes to actually laying out the network and setting up lines.

Workers & Resources: Soviet Republic - a slightly different genre (city builder), but it puts you in charge of both the economy aspect, as well as city building (and utilities like electricity, heating, water and sewage, which can be toggled on/off), production chains of various resources to use or export, transportation for citizens and a bunch more stuff. There's a lot of different mechanisms, but it doesn't feel horribly complex if you have some time to sink into it and it's quite lovely.

Honestly I also liked OpenTTD, but couldn't really get past the UI long term, it has that classic feel sure, but just wasn't quite as pleasant to use as in some of the other games.

Re: Railroad Tycoon II

#153

Post by wqaatwt »

pjmlp wrote: post #137
Yeul wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They did, does mean they will let Valve screw SteamOS on their face.

And what exactly would they do?

Re: Railroad Tycoon II

#154

Post by wqaatwt »

pjmlp wrote: post #133
cyberax wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Microsoft controls Windows and DirectX, Valve only gets to play until Windows landlord allows it. DirectX has to stay reasonably close to Vulkan. And Vulkan is not an afterthought for graphics card manufacturers, quite unlike OpenGL of yore. And Win32 (sans Vulkan/DX) is mostly feature-complete for gaming purposes. Manufacturers can just target the current state of Win32 for a decade more, if not even longer.

It certainly is, in what concerns NVidia, they keep innovating first with Microsoft on DirectX, and then eventually come up with Vulkan extensions. Last example, AI shaders announced at CEBIT. Vulkan has turned into the same extension spaghetti as OpenGL.

So any more “native” alternative to Proton would do even worse because at least not it’s at least keep Linux in sync with the real world?

Re: Railroad Tycoon II

#155

Post by wqaatwt »

pjmlp wrote: post #47
jandrese wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other hand building Linux binaries and keeping them running for years without maintenance has proven far more difficult than emulating Windows. For an example track down the ports Loki games did many years ago and try to get them running on a modern machine. The most reliable way for me has been to install a very old version of Linux (Redhat 8, note: Not RHEL 8) on a VM and run them in there.

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

It didn’t for decades (in this specific regard) why does you think it could change?

People running Linux hate software shipped as binaries due to various technical and ideological reasons. Why would this change?

Re: Railroad Tycoon II

#156

Post by wqaatwt »

pjmlp wrote: post #140
mschuster91 wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They surely can, and Valve got lucky UWP didn't took off as they feared. So what, assuming it had taken off it would just be yet another set of crap APIs to develop wrappers for.

So is the burden of playing with other people toys.

Still a nicer problem to have than developing “non crappy” APIs that nobody uses or cares about.

Re: Railroad Tycoon II

#158

Post by MrBra »

freedomben wrote: post #87
pantalaimon wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

ah, that makes a ton of sense actually. Thanks!

Also, take a look at Heroic (game launcher and library with integrated Wine for GOG/Epic/Amazon Prime), available for Windows too.

Re: Railroad Tycoon II

#159

Post by louwhopley »

There doesn't seem to be any mention of 2006's Sid Meier's Railroads! which seems to be an evolution of Railroad Tycoon.

I've played "Railroads!" for countless hours - it's an incredible game, especially when LAN'ing with others.

Any reason why this game might be left out?

Re: Railroad Tycoon II

#160

Post by gmueckl »

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…

Was the Linux port made by Loki Software by any chance? That shirt lived company did a lot to make Linux viable for gaming. They developed a bunch of new libraries to help with porting and open sourced them. SDL was one of them.

Edit: OpenAL was another one of their libraries.

Post reply on HN