I play OpenRCT2 with my daughter quite often, it works great, I recommend the OpenGL render engine since it allows for additional zoom and the kids love to see the people walking around and puking all over the park.
Roller Coaster Tycoon 3 and its spiritual successor, Planet Coaster, are fully 3D and allow you to even "ride" the coasters virtually. Apparently 3 wasn't received so well, but I'm a fan of them all.
Parkitect is the modern spiritual successor to rct1+2, while Planet Coaster is more like 3. The thing I (and some others) don't like about Rct3+planet coaster is that they're park painters where they're more focused on decoration and making a pretty park and the game is trivially easy, vs rct1+2 and parkitect where you generally have to put some work into making a profitable park and there's a bit more focus on the management and simulation.
I came here to find an excuse to mention Parkitect. Controlling the sight-lines of your park to hide employee pathways and deliveries in order to be more Disney-like is a great feature. Simultaneously fun and infuriating.
Eh, just slap blank beige walls everywhere and the peeps are happy. Obviously the game can't be expected to rate aesthetics, but the excitement of making a nice park is a bit lessened when you know that a beige solid wall would have done the same job.
Another thing I really don't like about Parkitect is that the physics feel too slow. The coasters don't have the same sense of speed as in Planet Coaster or RCT1 and I think a big part of the reason is the oversized peeps. Which is a shame, because regardless of what I said above, I actually like Parkitect's scenery and ride building the best.
Same with some of the City Skylines Youtubers ... I barely can get a functioning traffic network running (without despawning of vehicles) and then there are those who spend ages placing little bushes along the highways because it looks nicer.
RCT3 was great but it was so buggy. I think they patched a lot of the bugs with a big update but I was on 56k dialup at the time and couldn't download it. By the time I got ADSL I forgot about it. It's a shame and really sucked for people like me who bought it but couldn't update it.
RCT3's first person riding feature was neat, but the bump in performance requirements meant that building large sprawling parks just wasn't as practical. I've never tried it on modern hardware though.
Yeah, Theme Park 1 (1994) had pre-rendered videos to emulate riding the rides (and so for things like waterslides and rollercoasters didn't match your layout), but Theme Park World had 3D real-time rides of your layouts.
Yes? What do you imagine games looked like in 2004? That was the year Half-Life 2 came out. Obviously, a game like RCT also has to run a simulation and can’t focus on graphics as much as a shooter. I’m just saying, if anything, RCT3 looked sub-par.
At work I say "the ride never ends" everytime some ongoing issue or everyday shenanigan happens. My colleagues kinda interpreted that as something I say but they have no idea its a reference to Mr Bones Wild ride which is RCT2 meme.
I think that meme strikes a chord in people because there's an inherent relatability to being stuck in a hellish process almost deliberately designed to be as long and soul-crushing as possible. Some websites/user interfaces, "ecosystems", feel like they are Mr. Bone's Wild Ride in cloud-compute platform form.
There's another thing that was inspired by this. There's a really creative gamer/streamer/creator called "Daniels" who made a sort of troll level in Garry's Mod, a theme park which looked spectacular but had an infuriating and impossible process to enter. Inside the park had various pitfalls and traps to further infuriate participants. This sounds a little bit cruel but it's really fun: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x7ZrKehQ_xc
One of the lines from the original meme is "I want to get off Mr. Bones' wild ride.", but "Mr. Bones says: The ride never ends!" also features which the parent comment is probably referring to.
If you're going to confidently state someone is misquoting something you should probably make sure they are quoting what you think they are quoting.
> On March 26th, 2012, an anonymous 4chan user started a thread in the /v/ (video games) board, which included several screen captures from the amusement park management simulation game Roller Coaster Tycoon 2. The images showed a 30,696 foot roller coaster track with 38 riders that took four years of in-game time to complete. The original poster (OP) provided greentext descriptions of the images, explaining that passengers were constantly yelling “I want to get off Mr. Bones Wild Ride.” After the coaster ended, the passengers walked down a large path leading to another entrance to the ride, where they were greeted by an installation of a skeleton with a top hat and a sign reading “The ride never ends.”
Ty hats user created content, not part of the game. “I want to get off” is an actual thing that guests think in-game and is displayed in various dialogs.
For assets (graphics, sound, etc.), yeah. OpenTTD, an older sibling project, eventually was blessed with artists willing to remake all of the assets so the game could be played without the original TTD installed.
I think a lot of the charm of RCT2 comes from the specific assets in use and the degree of whimsy and joy they contain, more so than TTD's matter-of-fact trains and planes and such.
It's not like these folks are setting out to make a totally free-as-in-beer game that replaces the old one; they just want to be able to fix bugs and add features, and you can't easily do that with the original retail stuff.
The way they have been working on this has been interesting. Rather than a from scratch approach, they started with the original game and over time replaced component by component the original game bits with open source replacements.
That sounds like that wouldn't hold up in court, it's not a "white room" implementation by any means. I hope it won't be tested though.
Contrast that to OpenTTD or OpenRA where they (AFAIK) re-implemented the engine while still having the same approach of re-using the main games assets.
Edit: taking a look at the source code, I don't think what you're saying is actually true. RollerCoaster Tycoon 2 was written entirely in Assembly but I cannot find any Assembly files in OpenRCT2. So unless they already finished porting everything, it seems incorrect.
I looked at the source a few years back and saw more than a few functions that looked like the result of decompiling machine code to C. I didn't spend much time trying to see if that's true or not, but in the end it doesn't seem to matter. Still, if you like the game, you should keep a local fork of the repository, just in case.
I think this is the go-to approach for most of these kind of projects. You decompile it and then start refactoring it into C-functions and such that make sense. That this game was originally written in assembly probably helped a lot making the disassemby readable.
That's very common for projects like this. ScummVM is another example. If you don't require the original files to run, you're essentially redistributing a commercial game for free, which even for older titles is generally not advised.
It's weird to see genres come and go. Back then it felt like there was a "Tycoon" game for almost everything (well, most of them were fairly terrible, but still...).
TTD was always closer to my heart though really, that and the original Zoo Tycoon. I almost wish there'd be something like this for Zoo Tycoon, while Planet Zoo has some really nice attention to detail with the animals the level of design tuning you can do with scenery / buildings feels a bit overwhelming.
It is even more amazing realizing what a small team made the game, and that it was written in assembly!
The game holds up very well. OpenRCT2 fixes a variety of bugs as well.
I highly recommend https://m.youtube.com/c/MarcelVos
Marcel Vos who explores the limits of the game engine, various rides, etc. Amusingly there are scenarios which require nearly zero effort to win.
Specifically, the ‘small team’ is Chris Sawyer, with art by Simon Foster and music by Allister Brimble. Even though the art is very recognizable (made by rasterizing 3d objects), both RCT 1-2 and TTD are very much Sawyer's games.
That was RCT1, and they released a patch quite quickly... I mean, at max half a year after the game released, obviously.
Now that you mention that again, I wonder what the underlying issue here was. Nothing in the game depends on the real time clock, and more importantly, how does reloading the saved progress at an arbitrary point in the future break things? I do remember though that poking around the game files I couldn't figure out back then where the progress is stored at all. When I moved to a new machine, I reinstalled the game and then copied over everything from the old machine, basically replacing the entire game, and still all progress was lost. I could still load the individual save games though–which I always saved right after passing the scenario, so nothing happened. Luckily I was only 4 or 5 parks in, so from then on I made sure to save individual scenarios right before passing them, never after, so the win condition would trigger again after loading them.
I believe it was even more than one game that had this problem. If the data would be stored in a file, then any kid would copy and edit it. So, it was put in shady places in the registry and other windows configs.
I mean, the Android version is more surprising, especially since the controls don't favor the touch screen. Though I've played OpenTTD on a tablet and it was pretty good, if a bit involved.
OpenRCT2 seems to use SDL, just like OpenTTD—which apparently allows for relatively easy porting on various platforms. Sergii Pylypenko (`pelya` on Github) ported several SDL games on Android aside from OpenTTD—e.g. Ur-Quan Masters.
