Orange Planet

… are actually pretty good. I’ve always liked Baked Lays (significantly moreso than regular Lays), but I’ve never tried baked Ruffles until today. I daresay I like them significantly more than regular Ruffles too. Maybe they have Baked Ruffles Barbeque as well?

At any rate, I’ve been playing a game of Transport Tycoon on the side instead of doing more constructive things like working on an illustration I’ve been meaning to do (and to a much lesser extent, longer-term projects). I’ve been playing this silly game on and off for as long as I can remember; probably since I beat all the maps in RollerCoaster Tycoon and its expansion packs back in 2000 or 2001.

The point of the game is pretty straightforward: like every transport simulation game, all you need to do is move shit from point A to point B and make some money while you’re at it. That’s it. But while some games like RailRoad Tycoon (in my opinion) focus more on the financial side of running such an operation, Transport Tycoon focuses on the logistics of moving a ton of trains up and down a limited number of tracks. This is what makes it appealing to me.

Of course, there are trucks and planes and ships, but trains are SRS BSNS.

This game has gained quite a cult following (maybe not really the proper term here) over the past fifteen years; development is still progressing with a third-party patch that significantly enhances game play, and you can download a fair number of third-party vehicle sets as well. I usually play a game every time a major set is released; the current set I’m using was released late last year.

Since this game was made for DOS, it actually has to be emulated in XP and any current NT-based Windows OS. While the game is really quite efficient in DOS, the virtualization of the engine actually significantly degrades performance on a modern system, despite the fact that the game is fourteen years old. On both my E2140 and P8400, I can get significant lag performing some tasks with a game of 150 to 200 trains.

One focus of this patch and these sets has been to make the game more realistic, but realism is really what you want to make of it. With twenty-car trains being the length of a city, you’re obviously never going to have a great deal of realism, but you can try to avoid things like right-angle and fifty-percent gradients. At any rate, I’m always amazed how nice people can make a twenty by forty pixel locomotive look.

So the two pics here are from my current game. It’s 1996, and I’ve got something like 150 trains and a couple 747s. My track isn’t too unrealistic, but I’ve got a bunch of fairly dated engines running around for this time period.  There’s a seventy-year old steam locomotive and a GG1 hauling ass in that second pic.  And it’s a fairly profitable route, too.

Ok, that’s all for this time. Peace out.

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