OpenTTD (and Simutrans) in PC Gamer (UK) Issue 199

[JacobD88]

It appears that OTTD has got a mention, with Simutrans, in UK PC Gamer, strange that they mention Simutrans as having the option to download new graphics to improve the look, but not OTTD

In fact they seem to plug Simutrans in a much better light that OTTD overall, both in the wording of each review and by mentioning that it (Simutrans) has "better AI and more realistic representation of trains, buses, trams, planes, monorails, and any other transport you can imagine" We have all these in OTTD now, and in my opinion OTTD looks better than Simutrans too, Simutrans can look a little inconsistent graphically, and is a little more fiddly to play, what does everyone else think?

Mind you i've never really liked PCGamers approach to reviewing, i only bought the magazine for info on the three new battlefield games not their opinion

Overall though maybe this attention in an international gaming magazine will draw more people into the community, and that can only be a good thing (providing the forums don't end up full of stupid questions and comments)

[peter1138]

Copyright... you may have heard of it.

[JacobD88]

Copyright... you may have heard of it.

Apologies, i forget how easy it is to infringe copyright

Kind of disappointed with myself over that one, I'm usually fairly good at asking or knowing when or when not to do something

Thanks for correcting my post

[Zuu]

You can't blame them for using OpenTTD 0.6.x in the comparison, as that is the current stable, no matter what we have in the pipeline currently. Also as a member of the OpenTTD community I am not surprised that you find OpenTTD more inutiative (self explaining) to use. I am too more used to OpenTTD since I have by far spent much more time with it than Simutrans. Ask the people at simutrans forum and they will probably think that Simutrans is more inutiative.

[prissi]

Well, I had first no clue how to start a train and so on with OpenTTD. I think in crytically OpenTTD is a little worse, since it has to deal with a lot of backward compatibility. And without manual the menus under the icons or the tooltip help are not fast discovered by newbies. So indeed your expectations on how things work depend very much on what game you played first.

Apart from that my impression is that OpenTTD is more train centric; there are fewer options on road vehicles and ships, and you have a hard time to build an elevated highway or a subway. For plain train networks both are usable ...

OpenTTD has a well working online gaming system so that is clearly a pro OpenTTD there.

Simutrans has one the other side more complete sets, like all german set, all japanese set, the comic set in 64x64, 96x96, 128x128 and 192x192 sizes. And for instance pak128 has about 3000 houses, two magnitudes more than the original graphics.

But I think declaring a winner is not helpful at all. It depends on what you want to do anyway.

[Eddie]

Has anyone ever thought of including some kind of tutorial scenarios that were present in the original TT.

[Eddi]

plenty of thoughts, but nobody implemented it.

[MrFrans]

Heh, for a moment I thought the same person was answering his own question. It is like the cartoon series, Ed, Edd and Eddie.

I agree though, and have been thinking about tutorial scenarios. Amongst other things, I'm actually thinking more of something that takes over the pointers and shows you where things are. But anyway, this is getting slightly offtopic.

[FooBar]

It is like the cartoon series, Ed, Edd and Eddie.

I envy you for recieving Cartoon Network...

[Xander]

I think the tutorials really should be something the dev community reconsiders.

OTTD is huge now, I imagine to a new person using it for the first time the sheer plethora of options could be very off-putting. I'm running the latest nightly and just building a train timetable offers me more options than I know what to do with. I know I just click the middle button, click the station, click the station name, choose Full Load (any cargo), click away from the station name, then click the button again, click the destination station, then click the button again, click depot, then click "Service", then click the Stopped button, but I wonder how quick a new kid on the block would learn this?

[yoyo1505]

I have been thinking recently that OTTD needs to keep itself newbie friendly. It does a pretty good job at the moment by keeping most advanced features as non-essential, and you only have to look at them if you want. The in game content downloads continue this easy usability. Tutorials are one of the main things that are missing.

[Raccoon]

I'm currently trying to explain OpenTTD to a newbie and to him it is quite confusing with all the windows and options. And there seem to be several inconvenient things, too, that can give a newbie a hard time, like those fiddly infrastructure building tools and the whole vehicle-orders-system (which has become even worse in the current release due to its over-complicated GUI/functionality).

[Yexo]

I have been thinking recently that OTTD needs to keep itself newbie friendly. It does a pretty good job at the moment by keeping most advanced features as non-essential, and you only have to look at them if you want. The in game content downloads continue this easy usability. Tutorials are one of the main things that are missing.

I'm currently trying to explain OpenTTD to a newbie and to him it is quite confusing with all the windows and options. And there seem to be several inconvenient things, too, that can give a newbie a hard time, like those fiddly infrastructure building tools and the whole vehicle-orders-system (which has become even worse in the current release due to its over-complicated GUI/functionality).

Then please help us improve it instead of complaining about the usability. The wiki has a tutorial that can use some expansion/updating (as always). If you ca think of a better gui that offers all the options the current order gui does, please draw it (a sketch in paint is fine), and upload it here, together with a description.

[Xander]

I'll get right on that

[Zuu]

Having taken a though on this tutorial issue..


I came to the conclusion that the easiest way so far is probably to get around and add OpenURL support to OpenTTD as we then can have a big manual button in the main title screen that opens the wiki page.

Now I knew on beforehand that doing it on Linux is not a trival task.

But what I have found so far is:
* Windows:
Use ShellExecute
* MacOSX:

Code: Select all

system("open http://www.google.com");

* Linux:
There is no "default browser", and I can't find any attempts on sf.net to make any library for handling this issue. So what we will have to do is to ship OpenTTD with one browser, say firefox as default browser on Linux and have a setting so users can enter a custom browser.

But this adds the requirement of adding support for text based settings, which as far as I know don't exist at the moment.

---

Another "light" option would be to add a tip-of-the day window on the title screen. But this opens a can of questions regarding how translations should be handled. Adding a string id for each tip-of-the day might not be optimal? But if we should not use the current form of strings then what should be used then?

[Darkvater]

so, eh....anyone has some copy of this PcGamer magazine? Or some link to a shop I can go and buy it?

[eis_os]

Portland should help under Linux:
http://portland.freedesktop.org/wiki/XdgUtils

Keeping the balance isn't easy if you can do all... (it doesn't mean you should allow all in a game)

[Raccoon]

I'm currently trying to explain OpenTTD to a newbie and to him it is quite confusing with all the windows and options. And there seem to be several inconvenient things, too, that can give a newbie a hard time, like those fiddly infrastructure building tools and the whole vehicle-orders-system (which has become even worse in the current release due to its over-complicated GUI/functionality).

Then please help us improve it instead of complaining about the usability. The wiki has a tutorial that can use some expansion/updating (as always). If you ca think of a better gui that offers all the options the current order gui does, please draw it (a sketch in paint is fine), and upload it here, together with a description.

This wasn't meant as a complaint. These were just a few thoughts on the game as it is probably seen though the eyes of a newbie. And seems to be a quite complex sight.

In OpenTTD a lot of options and functions were added to the original game, all of which appear in one window or another, filling them with even more information than there were before. However, most of these functions are useful for advanced players only, while completely confusing newbies

See, I'm familiar with all the difficulties of creating guis suitable for different types of players. And in this case, it really is difficult to find a solution suitable for both types of players, beginners and pros, without recreating the whole gui.

I came to the conclusion that the easiest way so far is probably to get around and add OpenURL support to OpenTTD as we then can have a big manual button in the main title screen that opens the wiki page.

Simple, yet effective solution to start with. However, it only works for those who speak English and have access to the internet (unless the manual is included in the package)...

Which brings me to a great thing about the tutorials in the original versions: they explained everything ingame by just moving the cursor around, clicking and using tooltips of the selected language set, making them useful for all languages without extra translating efforts. Would be really great to have such a feature in OpenTTD

[Zuu]

I came to the conclusion that the easiest way so far is probably to get around and add OpenURL support to OpenTTD as we then can have a big manual button in the main title screen that opens the wiki page.

Simple, yet effective solution to start with. However, it only works for those who speak English and have access to the internet (unless the manual is included in the package)...

You wrote the wrong name in the quote-tag, it was I who wrote the text you claimed you have quoted Yexo. But I'm not angry or anything, just wanted to point that out, so you are more careful next time you quote.

And about your comment, I might sometimes forget not everyone knows at least basic English, since in my country most people have English as their second language and know enough to read a simple wiki manual with some pictures to look at. It is more often that they are to lazy to read I'd like to say. But you are right that there are countries where people don't know English as good.

Still there are many users out there that do know English, and thus can read the Manual in English.

Which brings me to a great thing about the tutorials in the original versions: they explained everything ingame by just moving the cursor around, clicking and using tooltips of the selected language set, making them useful for all languages without extra translating efforts. Would be really great to have such a feature in OpenTTD

For this we would need to store mouse movement as a series of buttons to use, rather than screen coordinates to make it resistant enough to survive some GUI changes or even keep up with that some people have the tool bar centred while other have it to left/right. And there is work by Alberth towards making the OpenTTD GUI support RTL (right to left) languages better. So the tutorial must have access to the constants for the different widgets so it can click on "auto-rail button on the rail toolbar", and then the screen coordinates are queried so the mouse pointer can be moved there.

[Xander]

We have some excellent translators in the group. If one of us lays downs the tutorial in english, what is stopping us having "tutorial/trains/spanish", "tutorial/trains/french" etc.?