Tag: openttd

OpenTTD on a Samsung Galaxy Tab with a Bluetooth Mouse

You may know that I love Open Transport Tycoon Deluxe (OpenTTD). It´s on my favourite games list and I also wrote a short article about it when version 1.0 was released. Recently I discovered that a guy name pelya did an Android port of the game using the SDL libary. And since I´m a more or less proud owner of a Samsung Galaxy Tab for a while I decided to give it a try. Right after starting the game one very big problem occured. The controls (and the user interface) hadn´t been redesigned to be used with a touch device (with probably a much smaller screen than a pc has) so the game was pretty unplayable. I was a bit sad about that so I headed over to good old friend Google.

I found a nice solution for the problem by getting my hands on a Logitech Bluetooth Traveler Mouse and connected it to my Galaxy Tab. Android is so flexible that this worked by only 3 finger touches (haaa…on a touch device you can´t say clicks, can you ?) and here´s the video result for you. There´s still some work to do to make the game really well playable. For example right now you can´t access more than a 1-layer menu because Android can´t differ between a mouse click and a mouse click and hold. Pelya – the guy who did the Android port – optimized the SDL configuration already after I gave him a lead but right now SDL doesn´t seem to be capable of doing that kind of mouse emulation. But I think the OpenTTD community will soon have a version ready that will be optimized for mobile devices in any way.

In the meantime you can enjoy the video !

Open Transport Tycoon Deluxe – OpenTTD Version 1.0

April the 1st 2010 – the OpenTTD team releases version 1.0 of the game.

OpenTTD is an open source clone of the Microprose game “Transport Tycoon Deluxe”, a popular game originally written by Chris Sawyer. It attempts to mimic the original game as closely as possible while extending it with new features.

http://www.openttd.org/en/about

The original game was released in 1995 (see the wikipedia article) and I´ve been playing it now for 15 years. It´s the second oldest game I´m still playing since it´s release (the oldest is Tetris on the original old school Game Boy).

And I really can´t describe what fascinates me on this game. Basically it´s all about building railroad tracks and streets, directing trains and trucks from destination A to destination B. To be fair – plains and ships are also available…OpenTTD changed not much on the original gameplay but did so many improvements. They managed to keep the game not only alive but in a steady development process.

I can´t mention all the features the game has, but most of them are listed here http://www.openttd.org/en/about.

OpenTTD required the original sound, graphics and data files from Transport Tycoon Deluxe. But development has brought things so far that there are open source resources available for free download, making the game TOTALLY FREE.

My advise : check out the game at http://www.openttd.org, download it, install it, play it and become addicted.

Some screenshots from 1.0 (images are very large) :

http://media.openttd.org/images/screens/1.0/20090821_luuk_de_vries.png

http://media.openttd.org/images/screens/1.0/20100313_rakim-89_d.png

http://media.openttd.org/images/screens/1.0/20091018_panswat_tongvorarat.png

(Update: removed the pictures, took too long to load, use the links above.)