Interview:
OpenTTD - An Interview with the Project Leader

With the growth of the Xbox Live Marketplace, Wii Ware and Sony shops, retro gaming has seen quite a resurgence. However, thanks to projects like the OpenTTD development, some of us never had to stop playing our favourite old school games; case in point, Transport Tycoon Deluxe.

Based on the polished version of Chris Sawyer's 1994 strategy, transportation simulation title, OpenTTD has brought a lot of improvements and changes to the game. Not only has it ironed out a lot of bugs from the original game, made it compatible with most operating systems but added a fantastic native multiplayer game mode too; did I mention it's all open source?

Today we sit down with Remko from the development team and ask what it's like running such a project.

Alltern8: For those that don't know, could you please describe the OpenTTD project and what your involvement with it is?

Remko: OpenTTD is an open source clone of the Microprose game "Transport Tycoon Deluxe", a popular game originally written by Chris Sawyer. It attempts to mimic the original game as closely as possible while extending it with new features. OpenTTD is occasionally abbreviated to OpenTTD, however OpenTTD is not an abbreviation of "Open Transport Tycoon Deluxe".

For those that are not familiar with Transport Tycoon Deluxe: It is a game written in the mid 1990s and is a simulation/strategy game for managing a transport company. You build infrastructure like roads, rail, stations and airports and then you order your own vehicles to run over the infrastructure transporting all kinds of cargo. Each cargo has its own payment characteristics and there are multiple vehicles to choose from to transport a particular cargo. Some of the vehicles are expensive and have high capacity; some are cheap with a lower capacity. It is upto the player to determine what the best vehicle for the job is.

Over time many improvements in usability as well as the simulation were made. Furthermore OpenTTD adopted a method to create your own vehicles, cargoes, industries, houses, etc. and how these objects should behave. This method is called NewGRF and its specification is shared with TTDPatch (a sister project adding features to Transport Tycoon Deluxe by patching the binary at run time). Besides the improvements and features, OpenTTD runs on a number of platforms like Windows, Linux and BSD. There are also many unofficial ports of the game to old OSes like DOS as well as to mobile phones, such as the Nokia N-series.