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I've spent hundreds of hours on OpenTTD, the UI is not great and brings back some 90s user experience. I have an irrational love for that game, I discovered th

I've spent hundreds of hours on OpenTTD, the UI is not great and brings back some 90s user experience. I have an irrational love for that game, I discovered the original (TTD) as a teen so it will forever be "that game". I also really love Cities Skyline, but I've got a grip about how car-centric the game is. It's not possible to create a city that mostly bikes for instance, you _have_ to allow cars everywhere (or go into mods territory, not my thing)

oehpr 5y ago
I honestly love cities skylines for how car centric it is. It is the premier logistical challenge in that game, and it is a genuinely hard challenge. There's plenty of games about building cities, but I've never played a game that really challenges you to understand the throughput and layout of road networks as skylines does. That said, I can see how people could get blindsided by it. You want to make a nice city and instead you're browsing wikipedia for how to make interchanges.
rplnt 5y ago
What do you find not great in the UI of OpenTTD? It's not perfect, but it's relatively great, compared to virtually every major build sim that came out in the next two decades. It's functional and fast. 00s UIs were plain horrible, and I don't think it got that much better.
- oehpr 5y ago
  Does OpenTTD not have A* track laying yet? It's such a bore doing it by hand all the time.
  - rplnt 5y ago
    It doesn't. There's a single tool for laying tracks that you can click or pull, but only in a straight line. I'm not sure how could it figure out what you want between two arbitrary points. There's always other tracks, terrain, something in the way.
    - foerbert 5y ago
      Yes, that is the reason they mentioned the A* pathfinding algorithm - to solve that exact problem.
sershe 5y ago
The worst part about Skylines is that cars don't need parking lots/garages, they just magically disappear at the end of (many? all?) trips. You can create car-free city with a single mod, the one that allows you to restrict the traffic types from each road segments... it's a giant pain though, cause you have to restrict cars from each and every road segment, if you forget some short path a car will appear out of nowhere and drive on it :) Surprisingly, it actually mostly works (although puts you in the hole money wise). Although, unfortunately you have to have roads in front for deliveries, because there's no such thing as deliveries from the back. So, pedestrian-only streets are pretty much impossible if you want a city that actually functions.

oehpr 5y ago

I honestly love cities skylines for how car centric it is. It is the premier logistical challenge in that game, and it is a genuinely hard challenge. There's plenty of games about building cities, but I've never played a game that really challenges you to understand the throughput and layout of road networks as skylines does. That said, I can see how people could get blindsided by it. You want to make a nice city and instead you're browsing wikipedia for how to make interchanges.

rplnt 5y ago

What do you find not great in the UI of OpenTTD? It's not perfect, but it's relatively great, compared to virtually every major build sim that came out in the next two decades. It's functional and fast. 00s UIs were plain horrible, and I don't think it got that much better.

oehpr 5y ago
Does OpenTTD not have A* track laying yet? It's such a bore doing it by hand all the time.
- rplnt 5y ago
  It doesn't. There's a single tool for laying tracks that you can click or pull, but only in a straight line. I'm not sure how could it figure out what you want between two arbitrary points. There's always other tracks, terrain, something in the way.
  - foerbert 5y ago
    Yes, that is the reason they mentioned the A* pathfinding algorithm - to solve that exact problem.

sershe 5y ago

The worst part about Skylines is that cars don't need parking lots/garages, they just magically disappear at the end of (many? all?) trips. You can create car-free city with a single mod, the one that allows you to restrict the traffic types from each road segments... it's a giant pain though, cause you have to restrict cars from each and every road segment, if you forget some short path a car will appear out of nowhere and drive on it :) Surprisingly, it actually mostly works (although puts you in the hole money wise). Although, unfortunately you have to have roads in front for deliveries, because there's no such thing as deliveries from the back. So, pedestrian-only streets are pretty much impossible if you want a city that actually functions.