Transport Tycoon Forums

I'd like to announce that I'm leaving the development of TTDPatch, and start working on OpenTTD, if their devteam doesn't mind. This must seem to be a sudden and unexpected announcement to you, but I've been thinking about it for a while now.

Ever since OpenTTD was first announced, I've asked myself regularly why I'm staying with TTDPatch. At first, this was easy: TTDPatch had NewGRFs and other nice features, while OTTD devs were still working on making OpenTTD work like unpatched TTD. Then internet multiplayer came along, which lured lots of people from the TTDPatch camp, but I could still tell myself that "our" features are more useful than "their" multiplayer. Still, the number of features ported to OTTD increased, and in the recent months, I've found it very hard to answer why I'm still doing it the hard way, and sticking to TTDPatch. My last reason was newindustries; it makes the game so much more interesting, and I didn't want to go back to the default industries. (I would say the same even if I weren't the one who implemented the feature - most of the fun doesn't come from me, but the set authors who come up with the schemas.) Now, as you probably already know, OpenTTD has working newindustries support, and my list of reasons became empty. You can nitpick about differences in smaller things, but practically, OpenTTD has caught up with TTDPatch.

The fact that TTDPatch 2.5 is stuck in the beta phase for this long just makes the situation worse. The main page still points to a 4-year-old version, so newcomers who don't look hard enough will get something very outdated. It seems that if Josef isn't around, things don't work smoothly anymore. I can't blame him, he must have more important things than TTDPatch; it would just have been nicer to have 2.5 as the last version instead of stagnating in a year-long beta stage. Oskar seems to have left TTDPatch development, too, so I'm the only "oldtimer" still working on it.

Now we have a program that's easier to code, easier to install, and easier to use for an average player. To be honest, when a newbie asks about TTD, I no longer feel fair to start explaining all the things he must do to make TTDPatch work - while OpenTTD is "copy it, start it and off you go". If I add bigger maps and internet multiplayer to the mix, the choice gets even more obvious. I no longer want to do things the hard way just because I've started it the hard way. I don't want to reject small and nice improvements just because it's too much work to do them in TTDPatch.

Therefore, I plan to move on to work on OpenTTD. I won't fully abandon TTDPatch, though; I'd still like to do smaller additions (especially if needed for compatibility with OTTD), and bugfixes (especially if the bug is in my code). In other words, I'll support my code, and other devs' code if I can figure it out, but won't work on new features or anything that would take a long time to do. I'm sorry if this seems to be a betrayal of TTDPatch, but this seems to be the most logical thing to do right now.

I don't lock this topic right away because I'm interested in your opinions and reactions. Please keep it civil, and don't bash OTTD or its devs, they don't have anything to do with my decision.

Welcome ! I wish you pleasent experience with OTTD developing!

The patch will miss you. You were always quick to assist if you saw a thread that could benefit from your expertise. From the sound of your message I get the impression that you will still be popping up every now and then so maybe its not as bad as it appears on the surface. I guess I'm going to have to spend a little more time than usual scanning the OTTD section of the Forums, if only to make sure you are behaving yourself.

A related side note to the remaining patch devs ... How are the bug fixes progressing? For the moment, I am still a committed patch player as well as an old fart slow to change his ways, and seeing an occasional bug fix progress report would make me feel a whole lot more comfortable in biding my time.

And so the death of TTDpatch begins...

Well OpenTTD being in C / C++ should make most things easier to do, and the ability to change anything rather than stepping around TTD's code, trying to hack them to do what you want should be quite a pleasant experience.
And I understand the feeling about being limited by TTD, atleast OpenTTD should be more 'open' for modifications; some of the more basic tasks I did were nightmares until I worked out how to do it the easy way... (i.e. lots of test hacks)!

[Note] I recently haven't felt like doing any patchdeving (or doing anything TTD related) due to my new course. (I don't even have any PC games installed)!
On the bright side, I won't be jumping ship, because I don't know / understand C, although you won't see many new patches from me for quite some time.

Have fun Csaboka,
~ Lakie

I fear you may be right, but I'm not jumping ship until OTTD takes on everything the Patch has.

Thank you for all of your effort, Csaba. You will be sadly missed amongst us devoted Patch players.

Long Live the Patch!

^^^ What he said.

That is inevitable ... I've always believed the funeral would be held around the time of the anniversary of TTDPatch 2.5 beta 9 ...

Csaboka has valid points, I would have locked the thread, soon it will turn into whatever is best discussions

Csaba, we're going to miss you and your contributions, but we all know that this was eventually going to happen someday Assembler is alot more complex than C/C+ and more devs = more features. I'll still continue to draw and post in the TTDP section, but if my coders make the grf avaialble for both I'm not going to complain. I've yet to try OTTD in the last few months, but I'm tempted to pick it up again. the thought of not only a full "Great Lakes" area map, but a map of Canada would be an immense challenge. Not to mention earlier start dates.

I'll continue to be a part of TTDP and its updates, but I'm also alot more open to OTTD as it were.

Keep up the awesome work Csaba. I expect to see new features in trunk next week

newcargos went into Open's trunk some time ago now. Months, at least, and possibly over a year.

Yeah, remembered that after I posted it, saw newindustries was added on Oct. 5th and was just too lazy to edit my post. Revised now

I'm supporting your decision Csaboka. You have valid points. I guess I can only thank you for what you've done for TTDpatch and thank you for what you will do for OpenTTD.

Csaba, as a long time TTDP player and community member, I can only stand by and respect your decision.

I don't think people should lament the "death" of TTD Patch. It will always remain it's legacy as the beginning of all TTD development, for without the patch, there could be nothing but TTD, which itself wouldn't even work on most peoples computers.

I'm very attached to TTDP, from the day I downloaded it the first time, I was amazed. But, we're more frequently watching developers creativity being stifled by problems out of their control - hard coded limits on TTDP.

YES, it may be spelling the end of one phase of development of Transport Tycoon Deluxe, but as the community itself wants to move forward, we can do so with OTTD. As long as TTD is always developing and growing, we'll always have a game to play. As Csaba said, why make slow progress on little things, when many more things can be achieved on an alternate platform?

That being said...

OTTD is a great game, but I've grown so dependant on things like autoslope and PBS signalling, that I'll be staying with what I know now. Even if TTDP stops development altogether, I'll keep at it, simply because thats how I play. When OTTD gains those things, I'll gladly follow, because...

...well, loyalty is one thing, but why sacrifice things just for loyalty? We owe Josef and his team a great deal of thanks, due to their countless hours of effort and hard work, but everything comes to an end eventually. We can't be held back due to loyalty alone.

Best of luck to you Csaba, I'll hopefully see you in the OTTD camp myself soon enough .

Thanks for your work to date on TTD Patch, your name jumps out at me whenever I think of some of my favorite patch features. You've not only been a great dev, you're a friendly person, always working hard to help out as well as develop the patch. Your contribution has been greatly appreciated by many more than just the vocal few too, I imagine.

Congratulations on what is hopefully just the beginning.

That's it! I was wondering what was tying me to the Patch. My loyalty is not so much to the Patch itself but rather to the features. Well spoken Mr. Raichase. That said, I have begun exploring the OTTD threads in a bit more depth and will be keeping an eye on things, and perhaps dipping a toe or two into the waters.

That said, my impression was that Assembly tended to provide faster code execution than the higher level languages. Would the difference be noticeable on my old 300Mhz Pentium II? (Not all of us are blessed with the resources required to buy our way into upgrades). I think I'll address that question to Csaboka, just to keep him on his toes while he has some dry ones left.

I don't think the death started by my decision. My feeling is that the death has started a long time ago, we just didn't notice it. Actually, this has been bothering me, so I've made a little graph about coding activity, measured by the number of commits to the SVN repository:


(Note: I haven't bothered substracting all commits not done to TTDPatch proper, ie. NFORenum and GRFCodec code changes)

As you can see, something happened in last October, and since then, there are a lot less changes in the source code. My guess is that that something was beta 9, but I can't be sure, of course.



That may have been true years ago, when compilers were simpler. Nowadays, most compilers can optimize aggressively, and they usually end up with code as good as, if not better, than what you can do with handcoding in assembly. I haven't done tests, but I'd be surprised if OTTD were much slower on a 256x256 map than TTDPatch is. It may even be faster, because it's optimized for recent processors instead of 386s.

Thank you Csaboka. I feel more comfortable now that I know the water will be warmer and I won't lose any toes to frostbite.

Your chart is very revealing. I suspect that it was not only the SVN commits that took a hit. Work on new grf files seemed to slow down as well at about that time. I suspect a combination of factors. I noticed a lot of the TTPatch regulars were moving on with their lives, entering university, graduating into working careers, changing career directions or finding personal relationships (love's got a lot to with it ) , and generally having or wanting to attend to real life issues, all the while the new blood that would normally fill the void being pulled elsewhere. I may be wrong, but I suspect that this is the period when OTTD crossed that line and finally attained the maturity required to be truly playable. On top of all this, perhaps the Patch has really reached that nirvana where all possible new features have been realized and all that remains is to clean up the bug list, cross all the "t"s and dot all the "i"s in the manual and announce a final release. The opportunity now for OTTD is to embrace those remaining features that distinguish TTDPatch and make it such a joy to play. I'm sure those fantastic new grf files will keep on coming and this virtual world we enjoy so much will evolve from "showing off that fantastic new bit of code" into "look at this fantastic new scenario". The nice thing about all those grf's is that, apparently, they largely (with a very few exceptions) work equally well on both TTDPatch and OTTD. Its a good thing they share the same Forum for their communities are largely the same.

Or playing World of Warcraft.

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The problem with TTDPatch seems to be that all easy things are finished, leaving the tough things to be included. Unfortunately tough concerning TTDPatch means virtually impossible, thanks to good old assembly and Chris Sawyer.

I hope you enjoy being an OTTD-dev, Csaboka. I have a sneaking suspicion that you'll make a good one.

What he ^^^^ said.
Have fun with whatever you like doing Csaboka.

Yes. And once new architecture or some new instructions (sse, mmx, sse2, sse3 ...) come out, you just switch for compiler that support them ... and with same code you have optimized executable :) Much harder to do the same with assembler. And basically impossible to port to different architecture (like from x86 to powerpc or so ..)