Transport Tycoon Deluxe was a famous business simulation game in the 1990s, as it offered a lot of unique features for that time and a really immersive gameplay experience despite its 2D isometric visuals that would be deemed way too simplistic by today's standards. As a result, even today after so many years, there are still many fans of this game actively playing its community-made open source version called OpenTTD. The players' objective in this game is to build transport routes of various types (roads, railroads, naval and aeronautic ones) and develop a powerful transport empire.
Anyway, OpenTTD doesn't only remake the old Transport Tycoon Deluxe and makes it playable on the modern computer of nowadays, but it also adds a series of cool improvements and new features. The most important of these is, in my opinion, the addition of the online multiplayer mode. Up to 255 players can connect to the same map simultaneously, which brings the old Transport Tycoon Deluxe experience to truly new heights, especially since the antique AI was never too bright or challenging.
OpenTTD also supports a lot bigger maps, and community-made scenarios and heightmaps can be easily downloaded right from the game's window. Other remarkable novelties are map elements like canals, shiplifts, aqueducts and the ability to join stations together, a thing which was badly needed in the old TTD.
As for downsides, there aren't important ones. I'm a big fan of this game but I'm also an avid game collector on Steam, so Steam integration, with achievements, automated updates, and all the other Steam benefits, would've made OpenTTD even more enjoyable for me. Another small flaw is that navigating your computer from the game's menu, when looking for save files or for downloaded content (scenarios, etc.), is rather difficult and counter-intuitive. A simple "Back" button would've been so handy.
In conclusion, OpenTTD is a great game that can be enjoyed by both fans of the old Transport Tycoon Deluxe and by new players interested in a neat business simulation game, alike.
v1.4 [Jan 9, 2014]
- Change: Remove demand calculation based on tiles
- Change: Use pkg-config for libpng as well
- Change: Use better distance metric for link graph
- Fix: [Windows] Crash when the operating system performs the "paint" callback during window creation
- Fix: OpenBSD compilation
- Fix: prevent from ever reading huge (or negative) amounts of data in strgen
- Fix: Severity rating of dedicated server messages during world generation
- Fix: Buffer overruns in handling of symbolic links inside tars
- Fix: Incorrect usage of strecpy
- Fix: Reading console input on dedicated server relied on unspecified behaviour
- Fix: Allow single-vehicle consists to station-refit in a meaningful way
- Fix: Prevent comparing to NULL when strndup could not allocate memory
- Fix: Potentially undefined shifts in NewGRF code
- Fix: Make sure there is no uninitialised sprite data
- Fix: Draw text shadow for ellipses
- Fix: Add special handling for PALETTE_CRASH to work for non-8bpp-mapped sprites
- Fix: Avoid division by 0 when scaling flow values
- Fix: Draw links to match _settings_game.vehicle.road_side
- Fix: Load button for heightmap list was missing
- Fix: Do not crash when supplying an invalid filename without extension to cmd parameter -q
- Fix: Some road constructions used the rail sound effect
- Fix: Goal GUI failed to shade.
