FreeRails, Sister Project of FreeCiv

lukel writes: "Recently development on the freerails project - an open source Railroad Tycoon like game - has been making good progress. Clients are being written in C++ (SDL/Qt) and Java. There are screenshots, notes on design, and a wish list on the homepage We're still in the early stages of development - slashdotter's insight please!"

Comments

Re:Two things:

[lukel]

Ok, I'll bite..

2) Why not try to come up with an original game? If I wanted to play Railroad tycoon, I'd have played it on Windows 98 5 years ago.

If I thought I could come up with an original game idea better than Railroad Tycoon, I wouldn't be working on a game based on RRT. While RRT 5 years ago on win98 was a good game, it was spoilt by several annoying bugs and limitations. You were only allowed to build 32 stations and 32 trains, and there was a limit on how much track you could build. Worse, if your cash went beyond $32,000,000, bad things happened.

RRT II added a few nice features and more up to date graphics, but IMO lacked the playability of the original.

You're right that we should be doing something original rather than just copying an old game: we intend to do so. That's why I submitted this to slashdot and it's why there is a wish list . If you have some original ideas, we'd like to hear them!

Nifty

[HongPong]

Very interesting, and I hope to see good results from it in the future. I observe, however, that at this point the art is pretty tacky looking, though obviously that will improve with time. I suggest doing as many other games of this type have, with terrain tiles make about 3 or 4 random pics for the same tile. I do so love trains. :) Are there going to be other terrain sets, IE the southwest, the sahara, mountains? It'd be a pity if it's just generic greenery-land. For me, games like this are all about simulating the surroundings too.