OpenTTD

Chris Sawyer's Transport Tycoon has always been in my top 5 games. I first played the standard version at Kevin Prest's place, sometime in the late 1990s. An ancient and rust coloured 486 laptop, with Win 3.11, was able to run the game well, albeit without sound. I purchased the PlayStation conversion and a mouse to play it with. I even bought a memory card to dedicate to the game, since one save game filled up all available slots! The PSX version had a new 3D view, similar in style to the ride-along on the original Rollercoaster Tycoon. Later on I played the Deluxe version of the game. By the early 2000s, I dabbled with TTDPatch before finding OpenTTD. In 2005 I began playing again regularly but this only lasted a year or so before Rise of Nations, amongst others, took up my gaming time.

Videos

I hope to show some of my networks here.

Ideas & Thoughts

Implementation of the 3D-style 'follow vehicle' view from the PlayStation version.
A calculation of resources used and earth moved in construction and land-shaping, plus a running total of all supplies and people delivered during the course of the game.
Power stations could influence all (or local) city growth, but only when adequately supplied. How about pylons (regionally customized) which spread from the station as supply and demand grows?
What happened to motorways/highways?
Why do steel mills have an insatiable desire for passengers but no other industry does? Tourism is hardly an answer.
Multiple locomotives on one train should allow reduced-power running when one has broken down. Or reliability worked out as a combo of both?
Airport disasters should impact both airport's ratings, especially the source 'port.
Why do only steam trains whistle before entering a tunnel?
Landscaping tools could include 'make water' feature.
Why can't some passengers remain on a train? Otherwise, all routes are point-to-point.
Why is there no civilian road traffic? There's Zeppelins in the 1930s.
A SimCity 3000 style 'maintenance slider' which could affect things like de-railments and accidents at facilities. Railways could degrade if not funded adequately.
Rail depots should be realistically sized. Long, and located in sidings facilities, which could be a prerequisite.
Proximity to a depot should affect how long a broken-down vehicle takes to repair.
Wait for full-load is a useful order, so what about "wait for half-load" or make a defining percentage possible.
Livery change should cost money and not be instant (do it after during a service?) and calculated based on the size of the fleet.

One problem that remains, even in the UK Railway Set, is how train reversing in stations or at the end of the line (the setting makes no difference) is handled. By default, the train magically flips. This UKRS allows for the direction of the loco to change when it reverses. That would make things realistic, except it still 'flips the train', meaning the loco magically appears at the other end of the train, yet is now reversed. The change of direction of loco is only realistic if it stays exactly as it was, then the train just reverses. Instead, it flips but stays backwards facing until it enters a depot, or reaches another terminus (or station). Sadly the feature of locos changing direction in UKRS merely makes the set more unrealistic looking than if the whole train just flipped, with the loco facing the right way (which is the default). The only way to prevent this erroneous behaviour in what is otherwise a great set is to disallow station reversing and make sure your trains can loop and never hit the end of the line, otherwise many of your locos will unrealistically flip direction but remain at the front of the train. Further to this, trains with a loco on each end shouldn't have to flip, yet they always do.

Check out the official website.

1995, 2005, 2015. A pattern has emerged. Spend 2-3 months re-learning the finer points of OpenTTD, then abandon it for another decade before realising even a single vision.