I love OpenTTD. For me it is the best game in its genre and maybe the best at all. I used to write about it, but it's been years since my last words on that topic. I checked what I'd wrote and I have been pretty sure that the project is stable, the future is bright and sky is the limit.
Well I was terribly wrong.
It looks like OpenTTD has reached its end. Not officially, no... Nobody has the courage to admit it in open words. Let's look at it - no new (game changing) features since... years. The last one was CargoDist. Three releases ago. Three years ago.
Maybe the game is already perfect ? Nothing can be fixed, optimized nor added ?
Unfortunately that is not the case here. Game engine still uses single CPU core. There are no signals on bridges and in tunnels. No local / express routes / line segments. Useless and broken mechanic of air transport, as well as water transport. Nonsense local transport counting, scheduling and handling. Impossible to change the day-length. Vehicle service and replacement... better not to talk about. Interface... well it is obviously aged and cannot be competitive anymore. No new, usable rail types (metro, overhang etc)...
On the other hand it all exists. Almost everything I mentioned and you can think of - was already written and released as patches. Some of them may be ten years old. I've read OpenTTD forums and there was a thread recently (mid 2017) which concludes the development and tries to set plans for the future. So the problem is that there is no active developers involved in the project. Many of them left. Those who stayed have no time for the game. They do not even review the patches. Which, to be honest, doesn't matter that much, because even if they did, the patches won't met their high standards. Their point of view (which, unfortunately, makes some sense) is "we have had a bad quality code in the past, nobody wants it to happen again, especially if we want the game to be possible to maintain and develop for next ten years".
The problem is - because of the fear of making undevelopeadable game in distant future, no active development exists at all. That's dead end.
Quo vadis? I see three possibilities:
- Most probable - nothing changes. We will get maybe one or two bug-fix releases in April 2018 and 2019 and that's all folks.
- Code standards will be lowered. We will get a lot of new functions in no time, but after that - the game will be hard to maintain and work on to add any more new stuff.
- Somebody will start (and will get community support) fork based on previous point. It had been already tried, but in bad atmosphere and it failed. But there are some unofficial, single person maintained forks on GitHub, which combines a lot of patches into a playable game for everybody. Well you need to compile the game by yourself, but still... Probably that versions will be incompatible with future official releases but there is even bigger probability that no more official releases will be published anyway.
Personally, I am going into one of the forks witch patches and I will play it for the next twenty years. Or more.
Maybe some alternatives ?
No, there is not 🙁
But if we really want something else:
Mashinky, which are still in active production (but available in early access) looks promising. Nice 3D graphics combined with 2D mode for planning and building. That looks nice, smart, and usable. I am only afraid that it will not be that deep on rail mechanics like TTD. But imagine putting OpenTTD mechanics into that engine. What an awesome vision!
Everybody forget about Locomotion. Do not try it again! Let it rot in peace.
Simutrans. I have tried. I cannot force myself to play it. Ugly, counter intuitive. Problems witch rail crossings and switches. I am pretty sure, that Simutrans fans can write exactly the same words about OpenTTD. It is just... you cannot love both games. There are Simutrans hools and OpenTTD ultras. And you'd better not be in vicinity when they meet each other. Those games associate only ultras!