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Kurt The Pope, most notable for his recent reviews of CodeWarrior and Code Fusion has taken time to play in a slightly different IDE ^[?] - Railroad Tycoon II Gold, by Loki. Click below for the skinny.

Rating 10/10
Buy from Lokisoft.

When I survey my life and contemplate which computer games have sucked my time away from being an otherwise productive citizen, Railroad Tycoon stands out high on the list. I spent many a summer afternoon with my friend Nate and his 286 building railroad empires while our peers were out living healthy and energetic lives. Now, Loki has released a new version of Railroad Tycoon, Railroad Tycoon Gold Edition 2, for Linux. RT2 is very similar to its predecessor, but has improved graphics, more scenarios, campaigns, multi-player support, a terrain editor and an improved and more complex financial model.

At the game's core, as the name implies, you build railroads. You ship passengers, mail, and a wide variety of other raw materials, goods and products from one location to another. If you send raw materials to a city with the appropriate industry, it will create a finished product for you to ship to another city. You have the option to select how difficult of an industrial model you wish to use. If you chose the basic, option, you can ship anything to any city and they will buy it. This obviously makes it much easier to find a buyer for your goods. Think it will be fun to ship every carload of coal in the United States to Alpena, MI? That's fine, because they'll happily pay for it. For those looking for a little more challenge or a more realistic game, you can choose an advanced model which only pays a fraction of the price for goods not demanded, or the expert level where you basically get nothing for undemanded goods.

But if you are only playing to build a railroad, you are missing the real fun of the game. If you play your cards right, it will be no time before you are making money faster than you can spend it. It is time to become a true robber baron and create monopolies that would make Microsoft drool. If you have a couple hundred thousand spare dollars, you can begin to buy up all of the industries around your railroad-though you have to be playing the most difficult industrial model to do this. While you do need to be careful to buy and hold only profitable industries, this is an easy way to earn a little money.

The real monopoly building fun, and frankly the most fun part of the game, is playing a ruthless corporate raider. RT2 has added features such as buying or selling on the margin give you that extra edge when playing the market. Thanks to the designer's decision to separate corporate funds from company funds, you can now first personally buy up a bunch of a competitors stock and thereby guarantee some votes when your company attempts to merge (or more accurately, take over) the company.

While the game concept and design are excellent, there are a couple of minor issues with the game. First, the scrolling is very slow which makes is a little bit difficult to get around the map. Second, if you choose to start a new game on a large map, it can take a little while for the computer to create the game. Both of these items, while they can be corrected with a getting a faster machine, the performance was somewhat slow for a fairly well loaded Pentium II.

Overall, this is wonderfully addictive game. There are a wide variety of difficulty levels, depending on how complex of an economy you want to play. If you are they type who would rather control the world's economy than run around through caverns shooting thiings, this game is a must buy.

Note: Railroad Tycoon II Gold, which this game is, is different from Railroad Tycoon II. As Gold implies, it comes equipped with more scenarios, and more playability.

When Slashdot reader magenta was invited to participate in the Loki Hack Contest attached to Atlanta Linux Showcase, his first thought was, "There must be someone more deserving of this high honor; after all, I'd never even seen Civ:CTP. But after a few exchanged emails and a bit of chatting with various friends who all told me it would be a good idea (thanks, Ross and Joel), I reluctantly decided to accept the invitation, and booked myself a cheap flight to Atlanta." (More below)

The Hacking Contest Nobody Tried to Win -by magenta

I am very glad that I decided to enter.

First off, nobody there, including myself, cared about the potential for prizes. There was a great feeling of camaraderie, of friendship. Thirty people (including Loki Entertainment's representatives; very few people, as it turns out, actually signed up, probably due to some of the FUD spread on Slashdot regarding Loki's intentions) talked to each other as though they were old friends even though we'd never met each other online, much less in real life. We all exchanged ideas for hacks, bounced ideas off each other, and discussed means of implementation. The attitude was the opensource mentality at its best.

And then we saw the source.

The official Loki Hack '99 t-shirt has a slogan on the back. The slogan is "I saw the source and lived." This slogan is incredibly apt. At the risk of offending Activision (which I certainly don't intend to do), Civ:CTP isn't exactly the best-engineered program around. Imagine the original release of Mozilla, put into a blender on frappé, shoved into a toaster oven and let to sit on medium heat for a few days. And then microwave it. The individual pieces of code weren't too bad (if not inelegant), but the entire package wasn't arranged in any semblance of order. The first hack I wanted to perform was XaoS-like smooth zooming on the map, so that when someone clicked on a zoom button, it would do it smoothly. I couldn't find, nor could the Loki people tell me, where any sort of useful callback would be. After tracing through about 10 levels of indirection, going past hard-coded constants and multiple redundant and nonsensical calls to seemingly-random parts of the source, I gave up and decided to work on other things.

But I saw the source, and I lived.

That is such a cool concept. Namely that I saw the source. The source to a very commercial, very proprietary program, from a very un-opensource company. Activision put a lot of faith and trust into this experiment, and hopefully they will find that it was well worth it. In just 48 hours, a couple dozen programmers who had never seen the source before added in some incredible changes. I rewrote the map generator to generate quasi-fractal terrains with randomly-combined algorithms. The person sitting next to me changed the game logic so that different civilizations would have different abilities (rather than just being different in name, one tribe could run faster but be weaker, while another one could produce technology more quickly but not generate wealth, or whatever), which was no mean feat considering the network-play mechanism. Various people ported SDL (the low-level graphics API written by Loki for the purpose of having DirectDraw-esque functionality in Linux) to varying other APIs, such as Clanlib and GGI. One person, whom I now consider myself friends with thanks to this experience, added in hooks so that during a network game, you could launch an arbitrary program (such as tetris) while waiting for other people to finish their turns, and also added in hooks for publishing the gamestate to an external server, so that people can watch the game from the outside, getting a play-by-play summary for example.

I saw some very cool things. One of the reasons I chose to work on the map generator was that unlike the main program, which took several hours to build fresh and 10 minutes to link (on a quad Xeon-600 with a gigabyte of RAM), the map generator was implemented originally by Activision as a COM object. Sam of Loki decided to take the next logical step when porting this code to Linux by making it a separately-linked set of shared libraries to be linked at runtime. Of course, Linux doesn't have any good COM implementations, certainly none which are readily-available and behave the same way as MSVC's, so what did he do? He basically reimplemented the most important functionality (QueryInterface, AddRef, and DelRef) in about 10 lines of C++, confirming my suspicions that without DCOM, COM is just a C++ refcount garbage collector.

The competition (or lack thereof) was basically the embodiment of open source. Twenty or so talented hackers teamed up to make sweeping improvements on someone else's code, without any real desire for glory or money. Most of the Slashdot naysayers were saying that Loki was obviously trying to take advantage of talented programmers by conning them into giving up quite a bit of labor for free. Well, Loki certainly didn't get it "for free," as they went out of their way to be as helpful and giving to the "competitors" as they could. They provided everything, short of travel; they even rented a hotel room that people could take turns crashing and showering in, and when the hotel-catered meals weren't enough, they happily went and got food for us as needed. And of course, the best thing that Loki did was deciding to do this to begin with. That and coming up with a very flexible NDA which only restricts our usage of the physical code for the next five years, which of course, we weren't allowed to leave with anyway.

I can't properly describe how incredible this competition was to anyone who wasn't there. Particularly I know I can't describe it to people who are driven by money and recognition, rather than the love of simply coding. Again, there was no feeling of competition there. Nor did there need to be. As bad as Activision's code was, it wasn't bad enough to stop people from simply having fun and doing very cool things. It surprised everyone there how productive they could be under the circumstances. It certainly surprised me.

Hopefully this experiment will be a positive lesson to Activision and other companies that opening the source can lead to wonderful consequences.

In any case, I would definitely like to thank the wonderful people at Loki Entertainment for enabling this to happen, especially Sam, who tried his best to help me whenever I was stuck on a piece of code, and Scott, who stroked everyone's ego in nice ways. I would like to thank the people I met there, especially Chris and Ryan, for being so cool to work with and knowing what this contest was really all about. I would definitely like to thank Activision, who made this possible to begin with; I look forward to seeing the results of this experiment, on every scale.

People who don't know any better sometimes think magenta's real name is Joshua Shagam.

Loki Entertainment has just released their Installer program under the LGPL license. This installer uses an XML description file to describe a package, and provides both a console and a GTk front-end to install it. I think this installer is excellent for newbies. What do you think?

Loki Entertainment has just released their Installer program under the LGPL license. This installer uses an XML description file to describe a package, and provides both a console and a GTk front-end to install it. I think this installer is excellent for newbies. What do you think?

squistle writes I am one of the support technicians for Loki Entertainment Software. This afternoon I received a message on my voicemail to call "Nick"--name changed to protect the victim--who was having trouble starting CivCTP for Linux on his Pentium III RedHat 6.0 system. More Below...

When I called him back, he thanked me for my quick response and said that he was new to Linux and wasn't sure if he'd installed the game right. He then said, "This machine is going to used for... well, I'm a Microsoft employee and my group is doing a usability study on Linux."

As it turned out, he had unpacked the tarball (I had to explain what a tarball was) on the CD by double-clicking its package icon in gmc and then double-clicking the install icon that came up. He had absolutely no idea where the game had been installed, and didn't know how to search for it.

At this point I pointed out to him that CivCTP came with a graphical install script, conveniently labeled "install" and placed in the same directory as the tarball. And in fact, in that same directory was a text file labeled "README" that explained how to run the install program.

I had him pull up a terminal window and run `sh install` (since he had a 4.5 GB drive containing only a fresh install of RH6, he wasn't too concerned with finding his previous installation just yet), and as the graphical install smoothly copied the files into their proper place, we chatted amiably.

Me: "So what kind of system are you using for this?"
Him: "It's a... [pause to read label on the case] HP Vectra."
Me: "Umm, what processor does it use?"
Him: "It's a Pentium III, uh... 450 MHz?"
Me: "Yes, PIIIs do come in 450 MHz."

Eventually, the installation finished. I encouraged him to grab the patch from our website, and he thanked me and hung up.

Ordinarily, I am very respectful to newbies. I don't even laugh at them behind their backs--especially if they have been looking through man pages and reference books trying to figure things out. This time I almost peed my pants.

Then the big question dawned on me:

What does it mean when Big Bill gives brand new P-III 450's running Linux to game-playing newbies who don't read reference books, manuals, How-To's or README's for a usability study?

Can you say "viable desktop environment?"

Note from RM: Yes, we verified the story. All parties are real.

Ethelred Unraed writes "Loki Entertainment Software has announced a contest where an elite group of hackers (in C++, that is) will be chosen to improve their port of Civilization: Call to Power. The winner will get a dual-processor Linux box as a prize. Take a look at their info page for more. " Thats a pretty crazy contest idea. They ought to give the winner a job.

Ethelred Unraed writes "Loki Entertainment Software has announced a contest where an elite group of hackers (in C++, that is) will be chosen to improve their port of Civilization: Call to Power. The winner will get a dual-processor Linux box as a prize. Take a look at their info page for more. " Thats a pretty crazy contest idea. They ought to give the winner a job.

Loki Games has announced that they will be undertaking their 3rd Open Source project, the SDL Motion JPEG Library. SMJPEG creates and displays full motion video with a non-proprietary format created by Loki. It was developed while porting Railroad Tycoon II: Gold Edition. Check out their website for more details. Suffice to say that "among its many benefits, SMJPEG allows for arbitrary video sizes and frame-rates, user-tuneable compression levels, and facilities for frame-skipping and time synchronization," according to Loki.

Loki Games has announced that they will be undertaking their 3rd Open Source project, the SDL Motion JPEG Library. SMJPEG creates and displays full motion video with a non-proprietary format created by Loki. It was developed while porting Railroad Tycoon II: Gold Edition. Check out their website for more details. Suffice to say that "among its many benefits, SMJPEG allows for arbitrary video sizes and frame-rates, user-tuneable compression levels, and facilities for frame-skipping and time synchronization," according to Loki.

gr00vy writes "Loki Entertainment Software are just weeks away from shipping their latest port, Railroad Tycoon II: Gold Edition for Linux. Lee Anderson has another pre-release review on the final build, which is on show at the recently redesigned ext2.org. Click here for more. "I can attest to the quality of this game. Playing the beta greatly slowed my ability to get things down around the office.

CrysMeth writes "Loki has just released a demo version of Myth II for both x86 and PPC Linux. Get it here. I'm getting closer and closer to just reformating my Windows drive to ext2fs (to hold all the new Linux games. ;) " Now that I've downloaded it, I have no issues Slashdotting it :) This will be the first Loki game I've tried - I'm curious to see what it's like. And while we're on the subject, Loki seems to have redone their website..

Loki Games and Terra Soft Solutions have announced a partnership where the two companies will work together in order to assure all of Loki's titles run on Linux/PPC as well as the x86-platform. The article says Loki has 8 games lined up for 1999, and some will come out before their MacOS counterparts.

Loki Games and Terra Soft Solutions have announced a partnership where the two companies will work together in order to assure all of Loki's titles run on Linux/PPC as well as the x86-platform. The article says Loki has 8 games lined up for 1999, and some will come out before their MacOS counterparts.

BlackNat writes "The 1.1 patch for CivCTP is available for immediate download. It fixes a whole host of bugs, including glibc 2.1 compatibility. There's also a beta patch for PPC. " I think this patch fixes a lot of the unit navigation bugs that tended to plague me. Now if I could only figure out how an archer managed to shoot down my stealth bomber...

BlackNat writes "The 1.1 patch for CivCTP is available for immediate download. It fixes a whole host of bugs, including glibc 2.1 compatibility. There's also a beta patch for PPC. " I think this patch fixes a lot of the unit navigation bugs that tended to plague me. Now if I could only figure out how an archer managed to shoot down my stealth bomber...

BlackNat writes "The 1.1 patch for CivCTP is available for immediate download. It fixes a whole host of bugs, including glibc 2.1 compatibility. There's also a beta patch for PPC. " I think this patch fixes a lot of the unit navigation bugs that tended to plague me. Now if I could only figure out how an archer managed to shoot down my stealth bomber...

pridkett writes "Loki Games, the same people who brought us Civ:CTP for Linux have just announced that they will be porting Myth II and Railroad Tycoon II to Linux. " This just came across my inbox as well-I've played both games on WinX before-let's hope they do as good a job of porting this, as they did with Civ:CTP.

pridkett writes "Loki Games, the same people who brought us Civ:CTP for Linux have just announced that they will be porting Myth II and Railroad Tycoon II to Linux. " This just came across my inbox as well-I've played both games on WinX before-let's hope they do as good a job of porting this, as they did with Civ:CTP.