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Interview with RollerCoaster Tycoon's Creator, Chris Sawyer (2024)

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Re: Interview with RollerCoaster Tycoon's Creator, Chris Sawyer (2024)

#31

Post by jcranmer »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #28
deanc wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The are no direct statements but one from his agency [1] > The project has no blessing or support from Chris Sawyer and our view, it is both unethical and unlawful, involving infringements that may in some territories be criminal as well as a violation of Chris Sawyer's rights and those of his licensees - all of which remain reserved. > RollerCoaster Tycoon Classic, distributed by Atari, contains RCT and RCT2 rebuilt…

Why would implementing a compatible game engine be unlawful? The code he wrote is copyrighted but the concepts and functional elements embodied by his code shouldn't be protected.

OpenRCT2 and OpenTTD are, at best, derivative works, if not outright infringement (the line between infringement and derivative in computer code is quite muddy, and there is very little in the way of precedence to illuminate the difference). These projects are not like WINE or ReactOS, reimplementing something by carefully observing what it does and attempting to reproduce it, but rather built (originally) by decompiling the original and otherwise heavily reliant on outright reuse of parts of the original.

Re: Interview with RollerCoaster Tycoon's Creator, Chris Sawyer (2024)

#32

Post by sfn42 »

jack_tripper wrote: post #21
jillesvangurp wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Communication overhead is a big thing in teams. If you have a struggling team, halve the size. It's crazy how well that works. It's not the people but the number of them. Once your people are consumed by the day to day frustrations of having to communicate with everyone else and with all the infighting, posturing, etc. that comes with that, they'll get nothing done. Splitting teams is an easy to implement fix. Minimi…

>Communication overhead is a big thing in teams. If you have a struggling team, halve the size. It's crazy how well that works. I wish my managers would get this. Currently our product shit the fan due to us being understaffed and badly managed due to clueless managers, and what they did was add two more managers to the team to create more meetings and micromanage everrying.

I would be so extremely out of there.

Re: Interview with RollerCoaster Tycoon's Creator, Chris Sawyer (2024)

#33

Post by Starlevel004 »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #28
deanc wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The are no direct statements but one from his agency [1] > The project has no blessing or support from Chris Sawyer and our view, it is both unethical and unlawful, involving infringements that may in some territories be criminal as well as a violation of Chris Sawyer's rights and those of his licensees - all of which remain reserved. > RollerCoaster Tycoon Classic, distributed by Atari, contains RCT and RCT2 rebuilt…

Why would implementing a compatible game engine be unlawful? The code he wrote is copyrighted but the concepts and functional elements embodied by his code shouldn't be protected.

OpenRCT2 was a direct derivative of RCT2 at first, to the point it would just directly call into the game executable everywhere.

See e.g: https://github.com/OpenRCT2/OpenRCT2/commit/643db7ae017e04d1...

Re: Interview with RollerCoaster Tycoon's Creator, Chris Sawyer (2024)

#34

Post by matheusmoreira »

Starlevel004 wrote: post #33
matheusmoreira wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would implementing a compatible game engine be unlawful? The code he wrote is copyrighted but the concepts and functional elements embodied by his code shouldn't be protected.

OpenRCT2 was a direct derivative of RCT2 at first, to the point it would just directly call into the game executable everywhere. See e.g: https://github.com/OpenRCT2/OpenRCT2/commit/643db7ae017e04d1...

I see. Yeah it's hard to defend that. The correct way to do it would be to reverse engineer the game and produce a clean room implementation.

Re: Interview with RollerCoaster Tycoon's Creator, Chris Sawyer (2024)

#35

Post by kragen »

HippoBaro wrote: post #3

> It actually took a lot longer to re-write the game in C++ than it took me to write the original machine code version 20 years earlier. Is the most interesting quote IMO. I often feel like productivity has gone down significantly in recent years, despite tooling and computers being more numerous/sophisticated/fast.

It's possible that "it took several years and a small team of programmers to re-write the entire game in C++" because ⓐ those programmers were not as good as he was, and/or ⓑ they had to duplicate the behavior of an existing program exactly, rather than enjoying Bob Ross's happy little accidents, as long as the game was fun.

I'm pretty sure most programmers who are comfortable in both C++ and assembly language can add working functionality to a program faster in C++ than in assembly. Of course, certain C++ libraries will eliminate that advantage, but choosing to use those libraries isn't essentially different from many other bad decisions you might make about how to write a large program.

Re: Interview with RollerCoaster Tycoon's Creator, Chris Sawyer (2024)

#36

Post by thesuitonym »

HippoBaro wrote: post #3

> It actually took a lot longer to re-write the game in C++ than it took me to write the original machine code version 20 years earlier. Is the most interesting quote IMO. I often feel like productivity has gone down significantly in recent years, despite tooling and computers being more numerous/sophisticated/fast.

Chris Sawyer lived and breathed assembly, earlier in the article he states that he just felt more efficient writing it than higher level languages. Then you've got the modern team of devs who probably haven't worked with asm since university, and it becomes difficult for them to review the original source code. Also Chris probably wasn't doing a lot of the actual programming, so instead of one guy working on a passion project, you have a team of devs doing a job.

Re: Interview with RollerCoaster Tycoon's Creator, Chris Sawyer (2024)

#37

Post by _vqpz »

deanc wrote: post #8

This game _is_ my childhood. Spent countless hours one summer doing every scenario, learning all the little easter eggs (Michael Schumacher on the Go karts anyone?). The spirit of this game lives on now in OpenRCT2 [1] - which brings the game into the modern age and is backwards compatible with all the scenarios from the original. It even features multiplayer park building. [1] https://openrct2.io/

Also Car Park Capital [1], an upcoming indie tycoon game in the style of RCT1/2 where you contribute to urban sprawl. It's being published by Microprose and runs on a custom engine [2] that makes it look incredibly similar to the original games.

[1] https://hilkojj.nl/

[2] https://hilkojj.nl/projects

Re: Interview with RollerCoaster Tycoon's Creator, Chris Sawyer (2024)

#39

Post by Aachen »

Jaysobel wrote: post #38

I print RCT 'rollercoaster coasters' out of my kitchen for Etsy. Free Dynamite Dunes candles this year because we ordered too many (write in that you want one). https://bansostudio.etsy.com

That page just says "Please enable JS and disable any ad blocker". I have JS enabled and this browser doesn't have an ad blocker...

Re: Interview with RollerCoaster Tycoon's Creator, Chris Sawyer (2024)

#40

Post by ekropotin »

scandox wrote: post #6
HippoBaro wrote: post #3

> It actually took a lot longer to re-write the game in C++ than it took me to write the original machine code version 20 years earlier. Is the most interesting quote IMO. I often feel like productivity has gone down significantly in recent years, despite tooling and computers being more numerous/sophisticated/fast.

> it took several years and a small team of programmers to re-write the entire game in C++. It actually took a lot longer to re-write the game in C++ than it took me to write the original machine code version 20 years earlier. Expanding the quote because the word "team" is probably relevant to why it took longer to rewrite. At a certain scale there just is a huge advantage in everything being inside one head...

I think it’s just unique for Christ, who obviously a genius who can think in assembly code.
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