Possibilty of an OpenRCT?

[relequestual]

we have open TTD, and boy do we love it. What about open Roller Coaster Tycoon!
I believe it was also written in assembler, so would need to trans coded to C++, much like OTTD was, if im not mistaken?

Surly it must have a big fan base too!

Anyone got any ideas? Id love to work on it, but i lack the expertises.

[Killer 11]

It's illegal thus openttd is questionable too(just don't start a debate bout it here)

[Dave]

I know that Josef Drexler (patchman himself) wrote something for RCT, but I'm not sure about anything more than that.

[nautre125]

Well, ORCT would be as much illegal as OTTD is. And I don't think TT and RCT were written in ASM, but probably in C. If you reverse engine them you'll get ASM code.

[doktorhonig]

RCT was written in Assembler? Any reference for that? I actually doubt, that TTD was written in Assembler.

[Born Acorn]

http://www.chrissawyer.com/faq3.htm

What language was RollerCoaster Tycoon programmed in?
It's 99% written in x86 assembler/machine code (yes, really!), with a small amount of C code used to interface to MS Windows and DirectX.

[Dave]

RCT was written in Assembler? Any reference for that? I actually doubt, that TTD was written in Assembler.

But it obviously was - ever noticed why the TTDP dev team is wholly smaller than the thousand of OTTD players who can dev their own patches?

I love the skepticism though. Hey, if you know more than Chris Sawyer about how he coded HIS OWN game, you go ahead and say so!

[nautre125]

http://www.chrissawyer.com/faq3.htm

What language was RollerCoaster Tycoon programmed in?
It's 99% written in x86 assembler/machine code (yes, really!), with a small amount of C code used to interface to MS Windows and DirectX.

BWell, I was wrong. but actually it doesn't really matter what language was used when you reverse engine a game.

[JamieLei]

I believe that RCT was much more profitable than TTD from Sawyer's point of view, and since TTD no longer makes any money (it hasn't been on the shelves for at least 5 years now) then I doubt there's much objection. There's only 2 bits that remain "illegal" and stop OTTD from becoming standalone - the graphics and the sounds. Once these are replaced, OTTD 1.0 will be released (probably with 32bpp 3D graphics).

With RCT still being a franchise that sells, no doubt Atari (who makes RC3 I think, correct me) would want to clamp down on any open source game which compromises their profits. It would be very difficult not to utilise original graphics and sound and thus lies the problem.

[orudge]

I believe that RCT was much more profitable than TTD from Sawyer's point of view, and since TTD no longer makes any money (it hasn't been on the shelves for at least 5 years now) then I doubt there's much objection.

Well, there is objection, as has been reported by Chris Sawyer's legal agency in the past, but they have (so far) decided not to bother pursuing any action, as it's not really worth it.

There's only 2 bits that remain "illegal" and stop OTTD from becoming standalone - the graphics and the sounds. Once these are replaced, OTTD 1.0 will be released (probably with 32bpp 3D graphics).

Well, I don't think OpenTTD 1.0 will feature 32-bit 3D graphics - it won't feature 3D graphics full stop (pre-rendered ones, perhaps, but not "live" ones), and there's the 8-bit replacement project going on which is more likely to be included with OpenTTD. The 32-bit version will likely be an add-on pack or somesuch.

With RCT still being a franchise that sells, no doubt Atari (who makes RC3 I think, correct me) would want to clamp down on any open source game which compromises their profits. It would be very difficult not to utilise original graphics and sound and thus lies the problem.

Indeed, it'd be rather silly to go and reverse engineer and reimplement something as recent and still-maintained (RCT3 etc) as RCT. Chris Sawyer recently won a lawsuit against Atari due to them withholding millions of dollars worth of RCT payments. Not an area you really want to go and try to rip off his work in.

A clean-room RCT-type game, without using any of the original graphics or code, would be alright. But that would be a lot of work.

[relequestual]

http://www.chrissawyer.com/faq3.htm

What language was RollerCoaster Tycoon programmed in?
It's 99% written in x86 assembler/machine code (yes, really!), with a small amount of C code used to interface to MS Windows and DirectX.

i knew i was right
yeh, after reading all the replies on this post (wow, this forum is really active), i realise that its probably not possible. Least i can make it portable using thinstall. Graphics requirements are minimal, and it can run in a window, so its awesome portable. Runningz off ma USB on yas colllege networkkz! lolz

I revisted RCT today, and discovered that i both have and love it. I miss the 3dness of RCT 3, however the clasicness of RCT remains. There are so many cheat things out there for it. its like when i discovered OTTD had in built cheat system, i cheated for a while, and then stopped playing all together. Shame.

I will proudly say i started about, oh must have been 5 or 6 ppl playing it in college. And I was almost the first to introduce portable firefox, while were playing that game.

[Redirect Left]

I know that Josef Drexler (patchman himself) wrote something for RCT, but I'm not sure about anything more than that.

As far as i know (I could be massively wrong) he wrote the Drexler patch, which stopped RCT1 from recognizing values that meant the game had been altered or cheated on, but that is the extent of his patching for RCT.

[orudge]

You're not mistaken. I'm not sure entirely what RCTPatch ("the Drexler patch") did, but it was Josef who wrote it.

[doktorhonig]

I love the skepticism though. Hey, if you know more than Chris Sawyer about how he coded HIS OWN game, you go ahead and say so!

I just didn't know the source of that information and couldn't believe it. While I can understand his choice for DOS Games on 386 or 486 computers, I think it's not the best choice for a whole windows game. From a software engineering point of view it's remarkable, that these games had only few bugs.

[tb2571989]

Wasn't it the "8 Cars Per Trainer" he wrote?

[XeryusTC]

The patch made it able to load some corrupted savegames which were just wrongly saved by RCT. Or well, that's what I seem to recall from it.

[Born Acorn]

Trying to use any trainer in RCT would explode it, the RCTPatch makes it not explode, and allows loading and saving of trainer games.

[DeletedUser21]

Trying to use any trainer in RCT would explode it, the RCTPatch makes it not explode, and allows loading and saving of trainer games.

And it allows user created stuff (like traintypes for rollercoasters and other alternative vehicles/boats for other attractions) to be imported into the game AFAIK.

[Born Acorn]

I think that's RCT2 only, for which there was no RCTPatch, as there were no custom content mods made for RCT.

[DeletedUser21]

I could be wrong, but I tought that it really did that. Well only Patchman can tell us the true story, too bad is isn't very much around anymore.