The old Rollercoaster Tycoon is one of those games that I’ve been playing on and off since it first came out. Usually I’ll play it (or rather RCT2, the superior sequel) intensively for a week or so and burn out on it, and then I won’t play it again for half a year or so. But man is it still fun and addictive when you do fire it up.
I always wished for someone to do to RCT what they did with Transport Tycoon Deluxe, and make an open source port of the game with added features etc. The TTD project has been around for a long time now and is called OpenTTD. I never really played TTD and was never really interested in it that much, beyond the fact that it’s related to RCT.
But now, finally, someone has started a project to do the same thing with RCT2. It’s naturally called OpenRCT2, and was actually started in 2014. I’ve simply missed hearing about its existance. But it seems it wasn’t until pretty recently that it actually got most features implemented. Naturally this means they have binaries for Linux and OSX available as well. So finally it’s possible to run RCT2 natively on non-Windows OS’s. Currently they’re still in the process of decompiling the code and translating it to the C programming language. TTD and RCT were originally written mostly in x86 assembler which is pretty impressive. I mean, who does that? Chris Sawyer, that’s who. So to make it easier to add new features they’re translating it into C. It seems that most things have been translated, although you do still need the original game files to be able to play OpenRCT2. The goal is to eventually be completely stand-alone and not dependant on the original game to run, just like OpenTTD is.
The project is very active, usually with several updates every day. I’m using the handy Arch User Repository build script to compile the development source code to always get the latest changes. Even though they’re still working on translating the x86 assembler files to C, they’ve still had time to add some new features. Some of the new features/improvements are:
- Ability to run in high resolutions like 1920×1080, as well as running in a window.
- In-game file/text input/etc dialogs, rather than Windows dialog windows.
- A cheats engine.
- Random map generator in scenario editor.
- Day/Night cycle
- Online multiplayer mode
- Twitch streaming client
And lots more. The online multiplayer is pretty buggy still since it’s a very new feature, but it has a lot of potential. And the whole game is being improved all the time. So if you have Rollercoaster Tycoon 2 laying around, give OpenRCT2 a ride.
Links
- Buy Rollercoaster Tycoon 2 on GOG
- OpenRCT2
- OpenRCT2 GitHub page
- rct2extras.zip – A little archive I’ve compiled myself from various sources with extra rides, scenarios, scenery, etc. Just unzip it in your RCT2 installation folder.