Business Simulation for Railways?

[motthew]

Does anyone know of a business simulation similar to AirwaySim for railway companies? Everything I've found seems to either be about driving trains or building rail lines (Railway Tycoon, Cities in Motion, etc), but nothing where you build a business on existing infrastructure.

I suppose my ultimate hope is that something like that could be added to AirwaySim, though I know that it's not realistically possible. But imagine the possibilities of a rail company competing with the airlines on, for example, the New York to Washington DC route.

[ezzeqiel]

Railway tycoon and cities in motion are both nothing compared to OpenTTD...


In openttd you create railway, air, sea and land transport... All competing each other...

You also have to crate the infra, but I usually play with several companies, one owning all the infra (govt like) and the others running lines...

[motthew]

Interesting. I'll have to take a closer look at OpenTTD. It still doesn't have anything like a realistic scale and scheduling, does it? Nor is it modeled on actual cities and routes.

[LemonButt]

Interesting. I'll have to take a closer look at OpenTTD. It still doesn't have anything like a realistic scale and scheduling, does it? Nor is it modeled on actual cities and routes.

OpenTTD is a "hacked" version of Transport Tycoon Deluxe (a 15-20 year old game now) and you can customize the options to whatever you want.  There are actual cities/maps you can download.  It is really only challenging though until you get to the Maglev era and then you can just print money as freight rates are based on how long it takes to transit (same with supersonic aircraft).  There is a bit of skill involved with scheduling as I've overwhelmed more than one airport (and rail station) before, causing big losses since aircraft can't land and end up flying forever and never delivering their payload.  The skill is more in developing appropriate infrastructure for traffic levels versus traffic for the infrastructure if that makes any sense (IMO).

[ezzeqiel]

OpenTTD is a "hacked" version of Transport Tycoon Deluxe

It's not a hacked version... It's an open one...

And believe me, there's a lot of skill involved... you just have to download some patches and some GRFs...

You can take a look to this guys games:

http://blog.openttdcoop.org/2013/08/06/dont-try-this-at-home-prozone-game-2013/

Interesting. I'll have to take a closer look at OpenTTD. It still doesn't have anything like a realistic scale and scheduling, does it? Nor is it modeled on actual cities and routes.

No. Scales are not realistic, and scheduling can be made thru patches, but it's also not realistic.


As of real cities modeled, you have this guy work (among others):

http://www.tt-forums.net/viewtopic.php?f=47&t=69669

But again, scales are not realistic...

[LemonButt]

http://blog.openttdcoop.org/2013/08/06/dont-try-this-at-home-prozone-game-2013/

Way too much time on his hands LOL.  I put "hacked" in quotes because most laypeople won't understand what it means   I just googled it and apparently it is a complete remake from the ground up with graphics etc. and is technically a completely separate game to avoid copyright issues.  I remember playing the original TTD back in the day on Win95/98.  It is a DOS based game and once Windows XP came out based on NT (not DOS) you had to do some ridiculous tweaks to make it run properly.

IMO the best part about OpenTTD (and other games such as SimCity) is that computers are so powerful that you can do some serious gaming without your computer slowing to a crawl due to the massive amount of calculations required

[ezzeqiel]

Way too much time on his hands LOL. 

jaja, I know... I joined a few games with those guys (not the pro, but some regular ones), and I remember messing up almost everything I touched


New computers and old games are a perfect combination.. Simcity 4 is now actually playable without lagging much...

[BD]

http://blog.openttdcoop.org/2013/08/06/dont-try-this-at-home-prozone-game-2013/

The guy who did this must design circuit boards for a living. 

That game seems more like a solo game vs AWS.

[Infinity]

I love to play OpenTTD on the train/plane when I have nothing else to do

It is a great game for optimizers (designing train routes/intersections/stations becomes a real challenge once you reach a critical mass), not so much if you are looking for realism.

[Jona L.]

The first computer game I ever played (TT back then), and still my all time favorite

When I don't want to play ANY of my games OTTD is always fun. Always something to work on (especially for someone with a little OCD like me), always something new to make, etc. IMO one of the best games ever designed.

And with OpenTTD you also have nearly unlimited options of "NewGRFs", that can modd the game, or just add new vehicles, etc.

I still have my old savegames from the mid-late 1990s... somewhere . I usually have so massive savegames with OTTD, that even my computer (a high end gaming system) gets to it's edges .

[Jona L.]

OTTD 1.4.0 is in Beta 5 state so far. (--> http://www.openttd.org/en/ )

Most important change: maximum map size increased from 2048x2048 tiles to 4096x4096 tiles.

I so need a new computer by the time I filled that map