In 1995, Scottish video game designer Chris Sawyer created a business simulator game. transport tycoon deluxe — and within four years, according to Wikipedia, work began on the first open source version, which is still in active development. “According to a study of 61,154 open source projects on SourceForge from 1999 to 2005, OpenTTD ranks as the 8th most active open source project receiving patches and contributions. has been moved to its own server.”
A longtime Slashdot reader, orudge says he's been involved with Slashdot for almost 25 years. “Just 21 years ago, he suddenly received an ICQ message (look closely) from a man named Ludwig Strigheus (nicknamed Rudde).”
“Hello, you may not know me, but I'm working on a project to create clones. transport tycoon deluxe “For a while,” he said, more or less… Rudde took the project further [written in C] Over the next year, he also tried some multiplayer games (especially with dial-up connections, which weren't very reliable at the time). Eventually, when he was satisfied with what he had created, he agreed to let me release the game as open source. Coincidentally, this happened on March 6, 2004, exactly one year after I first spoke to him…
After this, things really took off and a community of dedicated developers began to form to fix bugs, add new features, and smooth out the rough edges. I think Mr. Rudde was a little taken aback by his popularity and temporarily returned to development work. Reading old changelogs will show you how much functionality was added in a very short period of time. Immediate effects such as increased vehicle limits were immediate, and after just four months he had TTDPatch's support for his NewGRF format working. Larger maps, improved multiplayer, improved pathfinder, improved his TTDPatch compatibility, and of course to so many different operating systems like Mac OS X, BeOS, MorphOS, OS/2, etc. transplant. It was a very exciting time for TTD fans!
Within six years, the ambitious project to create a free replacement for the original TTD graphics, sounds, and music set was completed and OpenTTD was finally released in 1.0. While we may not be adding new features as aggressively as we were in 2004, we still see major improvements to the code, many exciting new features have been added over the years, and major releases every year since 2008. . He has migrated to his GitHub. His release of OpenTTD on Steam in 2018 and 2021 also reinvigorated development efforts, and thousands of people now enjoy the game on a regular basis. And the development shows no signs of slowing down, with over 40 of his new features included in the upcoming OpenTTD 14.0 release.
“Personally, I would like to thank everyone who has supported the development of OpenTTD over the past 20 years…” they wrote, adding, “Finally, of course, we would like to thank everyone who has supported the development of OpenTTD over the past 20 years…” I want to thank you all, not all of us,” he added. If people weren't already playing the game, they'd be here.
“Given how the first 20 years have gone, I can't wait to see what the next 20 years have in store. :)”
