FreeRails, Sister Project of FreeCiv

lukel writes: "Recently development on the freerails project - an open source Railroad Tycoon like game - has been making good progress. Clients are being written in C++ (SDL/Qt) and Java. There are screenshots, notes on design, and a wish list on the homepage We're still in the early stages of development - slashdotter's insight please!"

Re:Two things:

[lukel]

Ok, I'll bite..

2) Why not try to come up with an original game? If I wanted to play Railroad tycoon, I'd have played it on Windows 98 5 years ago.

If I thought I could come up with an original game idea better than Railroad Tycoon, I wouldn't be working on a game based on RRT. While RRT 5 years ago on win98 was a good game, it was spoilt by several annoying bugs and limitations. You were only allowed to build 32 stations and 32 trains, and there was a limit on how much track you could build. Worse, if your cash went beyond $32,000,000, bad things happened.

RRT II added a few nice features and more up to date graphics, but IMO lacked the playability of the original.

You're right that we should be doing something original rather than just copying an old game: we intend to do so. That's why I submitted this to slashdot and it's why there is a wish list [sourceforge.net]. If you have some original ideas, we'd like to hear them!

Aerobiz

[Tachys]

One game I have always wanted to see an open version of is Aerobiz [k12.or.us]

Re:Aerobiz

[danpbrowning]

Me too!

I loved that game.

Nifty

[HongPong]

Very interesting, and I hope to see good results from it in the future. I observe, however, that at this point the art is pretty tacky looking, though obviously that will improve with time. I suggest doing as many other games of this type have, with terrain tiles make about 3 or 4 random pics for the same tile. I do so love trains. :) Are there going to be other terrain sets, IE the southwest, the sahara, mountains? It'd be a pity if it's just generic greenery-land. For me, games like this are all about simulating the surroundings too.

Re:Nifty

[lukel]

The graphics could certainly be improved. At the moment we're using the freeciv trident tileset which I adapted a little myself to get something to work with. What we really need is someone artistic who can dedicate a bit of time to the graphics. I'm not sure what the best approach would be. A couple of people on the mailing list have said they would like freerails to have isometric graphics. Personally, I'm not a big fan of isometric graphics and don't think they add much to a 2D game other than making the screenshots look better, but it would be possible to have an isometric mode as well as a square tiled mode.

Something I was thinking about some time ago was using a 3D package to build models of trains and buildings and then use them (pre rendered) instead of hand-drawn graphics. This might make them look a bit better, but on the other hand, rendered graphics often seem to lack character.

Are there any similar games (i.e. tile based) that stand out as having good (but relatively simple) graphics? I haven't been following releases recently.

Re:Nifty

[redcliffe]

Are there any open source artists around? Maybe that would be a good group to form. A group of artists that would help out open source projects.

open-source artists

[HongPong]

i should become an open-source artist. Right now I'm busy but maybe a few weeks down the road... Open source artists...

Choosing the right scope for the game

[lukel]

I was flipping through the original RRT manual when I noticed the "Designer's Notes" at the back. I think the following raises an interesting point:

A central problem was choosing the right scope of the game. Sid's early game was a model railroading game. Bruce's proposal posed the player as the president and guiding force of a railroad...

Something I've noticed is that when people make suggestions, they're are usually something like this: X is unrealistic, you should do Y (something more complicated) instead. While more realism, all else constant, makes for a better game; all else usually isn't constant: more realism usually means more complexity, and too much complexity spoils game play. I've tried a few flight-sims that went for all out realism, and they weren't much fun.

The questions is: what should the scope for freerails be?