Transport Tycoon Forums

Well, the game is licenced under the GPL, so it is, at least, free as in speech!

Revision 248 - game is now launchable

Currently working on company window

Interesting. Can't wait for this to finish. No pressure though.

Weather demo

http://youtu.be/gOQSEs1XInQ

Looks like the game framework has come together very nicely, it is great to see features like this flowing... How is the more infrastructure/gameplay side of things coming along?

Well. This clip is actually a filler, so things seem to be going along

I am currently working on the financial side of the game - that is player avatar, his/her bloodline, companies led and stock market. After that I want to finish the vegetation/town implementation and start working on some actual transport

It looks like it's coming along quite nicely mate!! I wish I had studied a bit harder at uni during my programming days, I'd love to help. I may be of assistance when it comes time to do vehicles, if you need.

Keep up the good work guys, it looks like it'll be a ripper!!

Company creation gui: http://youtu.be/2r7bTjduZM4

My next step is to refresh and start using the tree generation algorithm. Which will require implementation of the map partition module.

Logos - for great justice.

New website should be online shortly

New and improved page has been posted. Comments are welcome.

here-> www.transportempire.com

Hey guys. I'm liking the look of what you have so far and what you want to achieve.

However, I notice you are a bit short of hands. Unfortunately I can't offer you any help with the actual programming (I'm really rusty - haven't done anything serious since university) but I think there are other areas I can help with. Particularly around your design document, product roadmap (do you have one?), release planning, organising coding activities, quality assurance/control practices etc.

As a starter for ten I'll give your design document a proper peer review. I think there are some areas that I can help improve in terms of clarity and focus. I think that honestly, a lot of it is wishy-washy. Perhaps I can help remedy that!

I think with a bit of work (that I am happy to help with) we can put together a solid plan that might get others wanting to help out. It's easier to volunteer if you know what you are getting into! As they say, many hands make light work.

If you are interested and want some help, drop me a PM and I'll tell you a bit more about myself.

Ok - I've read your document. My impression of it is that it does a good job of listing all of the suggestions that have come forth to date. There's a lot of stuff in there to varying degrees of detail. It's a good start point. What is lacking is any clear indication of which parts are the real keys to the game.

For example, there are some items in there about the political alignment of the chairman, about the bloodlines, the scandal etc. Is this really important? Is it a key part of what makes the game what it is, or is it just a nice diversion. I'm not sure - it could be a good feature (something a bit like Tropico 4).

What I would propose is that the document is retained in it's current form for reference, but that a single A4 page document is created to supplement it. This should detail in very brief terms the key items in order of priority. That is then used to push forward an agile style of development. Take each item and set aside a length of time (say a month) and decide what you want to do in that time. So, perhaps you want to implement track laying, station building and train construction.

Offer these jobs out on the forums to anyone who wants to take them, or do them with the volunteers you have (if any). Then, at the end of that period throw it all out there for people to try (make some binaries to make it easy on people). See what works and see what doesn't. Then decide what to do with the next chunk of time. All the while having your overall map in mind.

As you go, build what you have done back into the document (the short single pager) and have it as a living document.

The strength with a project like this over an internally developed piece of software is that you are free to release short incremental upgrades without leaking your ideas to the competition or any of that other rubbish. I think this is what is going to have to be the strength of the project. Early feedback from users really helps to polish the game at the lowest possible cost and the short cycles (or sprints) allow flexibility and keep a bit of interest in the whole thing.

I know there are not many people working on this at the moment, so it might not be much use (but hopefully something to think about). What I would also say though is that if you have people volunteering to help with vehicles etc. and other non-coding tasks. Try to focus some effort on making this possible. A weather engine will wait if you can spend the time to get others making content.

Looks nice!

From an outside view, it looks as though you're implementing some non-essential things (stock-market, avatar) before essential things. I would guess that all transporting-related stuff would be the most important and implemented first. The risk of the current approach is that it takes longer before the game has a minimal 'playable' state. On the other hand, if doing these things keeps you interested it serves an important purpose

Brian_Spiller:

You have a correct impression. The current DD was written as a reference document for all the relevant features the finished product should have. However it tries to not constrain it with, numerical values and such.

I envisioned that as each feature of the game gets implemented, it gets its own design document - so there would be a separate railroad DD, road transport DD, towns DD etc.

I did so because work experience tought (sp?) me that waterfall approach to design just does not work and it is better to define a blurry boundries and define them as I go.

bokkie:

There are no "essential" features. Alternatively, all features are essential. In the case of the weather. I needed a test for event/signal interfaces. Company, in the game's design, is a container of all the transportation content. Just because it is also a financial entity is a bonus.

I like the new site, and "It is difficult to judge if we manage to succeed, and given the history of the projects, one should be pessimistic. However, we just refuse to give up." nicely sums up this project's history.
The fluorescent green bar at the bottom hurts me eyes though.

Alpha version ( sorry, windows only ).
You may need some libraries such as visual studio runtime.

Self extracting version:
http://www.transportempire.com/alpha_ve ... 120211.exe
Plain old zip file:
http://www.transportempire.com/alpha_ve ... 120211.zip

Just copy to a new directory, uncompress and run the application_starter_win32_release.exe

Notify of any bugs/errors/crashes etc

mouse wheel zooms in/out
mouse + hold right mouse button - move terrain
mouse + ctrl + right mouse button - rotate terrain
to exit the game use ESC

Looks awesome! I love the way the land colour changes with the seasons. I think you can take away some of the beach and make the landscape a little flatter in places and it'll be perfect. Everything ran very smoothly, no FPS issues at all.

When rotating the screen, does it make sense to rotate around the position of the mouse rather than the position of the screen? I'm not sure what's conventional, maybe it's correct how it is.

Some notes on installing and running:
You will need the Microsoft Visual C++ 2010 Redistributable Package (x86) in order to run.
The self-extracting file is very Polish


On an unrelated note, the theme hospital clone CorsixTH is written in C++ and uses Lua for the configuration / game logic side - something that works really well. Do you think this would be a good way forward for TE?

Steve

It does look nice! In some angles, I get a line across the screen. See attachment. Other than that, I get two mouse cursors: the in-game one and the windows cursor.