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Railroad Tycoon II

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Re: Railroad Tycoon II

#171

Post by wqaatwt »

robertlagrant wrote: post #162
wqaatwt wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about it? I’m just curious what specifically do you think MS could do that wouldn’t get them into extreme trouble with the EU/FTC?

They could create a new interface that's somehow more efficient, and work with Unreal / Unity / Godot and a few others so it's just a recompile for them, but it's a bigger problem for Wine, perhaps? I'm just thinking out loud.

They “could” also create a new interface that's somehow more efficient for Windows. Oh wait..

I don’t think MS has the attention span for stuff like that. Especially considering the limited short to medium term payoff.

They could buy Unity though. Considering how mismanaged that company is it wouldn’t be such a bad outcome. Of course large acquisitions are very costly and risky these days.

Re: Railroad Tycoon II

#172

Post by jamesfinlayson »

BlueTemplar wrote: post #99
jandrese wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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" ?

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

Not sure - Wolfenstein 3D was open sourced in 1995 (two years after Doom was released).

Re: Railroad Tycoon II

#173

Post by dehugger »

pjmlp wrote: post #134
jwcooper wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft is going the opposite of what you're suggesting. Their games are coming to Steam, Playstation and Switch. Also, their game division isn't exactly thriving right now. They have a ton of studios, but they are not selling hardware very well right now. The more that time goes on, and the more entrenched steamOS/Proton becomes, they will not have any sort of easy time trying to lock-in to Windows. Even now in th…

Playstation and Switch, for sure. Steam, not on detriment of Windows, how can they allow something like SteamOS to put Windows to shame, with their own APIs? I can bet on them changing that, lets see who's got deeper pockets.

I would posit that in this scenario it is Valve who has the deeper pockets. It's a privately owned company and not beholden to the whims of a quarterly driven revenue cycle, and it's a matter of life or death for the organization.

In contrast, gaming is essentially a side show for Microsoft. The resources required to push Valve off it's pedestal would have higher returns invested elsewhere.

Re: Railroad Tycoon II

#174

Post by sevensor »

mywittyname wrote: post #110
legitster wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 conne…

For most cities, the first few loads often have enough profit to cover like 10-15% of the build costs, with the first year usually covering 25-35% of the build costs. After two years or so, with no other expansion, cargo trade will be dramatically reduced and the bulk the cargo will be passenger/mail cargo, but so long as you don't allow empty shipments, the line should remain profitable. The fun comes from trying ex…

The trade model in RT2 is broken in ways that make it fun, but also kind of predictable. You get paid a whole lot more for long hauls than for short ones, and you’re less likely to satiate demand that way. In most maps it makes more sense to deliver coal to a steel mill from 500 miles away than it does to haul it from the mine next door. This pushes you to build massive, sprawling rail networks rather than tight, efficient local ones. Which is clearly tuned for fun over realism. RT3 turns the knob toward realism in a way that sucks a lot of the fun out.

Re: Railroad Tycoon II

#175

Post by sevensor »

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.

Plays just fine under Wine, better than on modern Windows in fact

Re: Railroad Tycoon II

#176

Post by bombcar »

mnky9800n wrote: post #169
bombcar wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It really is a world of difference - XBMC 20+ years ago made your TV a wonder to behold, more powerful than anything anyone else would have (and desirable, too!). Now a full Plex + JellyFin + Infuse setup just makes it feel like some sort of knockoff Netflix. There are still advantages. But they’re not as noticeable (main one being if you can find it, you can have it instead of having to search various streaming plat…

yes i remember setting up a system through xbmc that made it so the tv would appear to have cable channels that were built from everything that was on my storage. So you had channels for different genres or cartoons or movies or whatever. and you could flip through the channels and watch whatever was on. and now it's just that you can even watch digitizations of old vhs recordings of television on youtube if you want…

Yeah, though one really nice thing I've discovered is that JellyFin has support for what it calls "home videos" and that + Infuse means the family has access to all those recordings to take but never watch, like kid's recitals, etc.
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