Pixelate:Issue 1/Transport Master

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TRANSPORT MASTER

You are (or at least, will be) in charge of a transport company. How will you do? By Owen Rudge

Transport Tycoon DeluxeTransport Master is a game based on the games Transport Tycoon (TT) and Transport Tycoon Deluxe (TTD) by Chris Sawyer. These games put you in charge of a transport company, and you had to decide what to do: build a line to the new coal mine, or wait a bit? Connect two close towns or further away ones? The World Editor add-on pack for TT included support for custom-built scenarios, which was included as standard in TTD. The Deluxe edition also included four different climates - temperate, sub-arctic, sub-tropical and Toyland, although whether "climate" is the correct word for the latter is debatable.

Transport Master is an attempt to create a similar game to the Transport Tycoon series, but with new enhancements and additions that have been wanted by people all over the world (for some examples, see my Transport Tycoon Station, the Transport Tycoon Semi-FAQ and Oliver Keating's TTD pages).

Early version of Transport MasterI originally started programming Transport Master in DirectX with Visual Basic. On the left is a screenshot (click for the full picture) from a fairly early version of Transport Master. You could click and a piece of road would appear, but this would appear anywhere, not nicely lined up in the grid. It was a very primative version of Transport Master.

I then pretty much started from scratch, again in Visual Basic. This version had a fair bit of code in it, and was quite good considering. There were still no vehicles, industries or "game" to play, but the basic framework was almost complete. I'd even created a nice title, which I'm using in the latest version. This version had a music system whereby you could change the music (the last version simply played the music from track 1 to track 21 without a choice). The second Visual Basic versionThere was also grid that worked (most of the time - when you moved from the original positions things could get a bit, uh, messy). I had also implemented multiple currency support and a money dialog! (See screenshot on right).

The big move

Around the 16th December 2000, I started work on a version that used DJGPP and Allegro. Why? Because the Visual Basic version wasn't very portable, and there were some things that could be done more easily (and quickly) in C. (There are also some things that can be done more easily in VB!). I've been hacking away on it, and it currently has the following feature list:

• Nice titles (and, up to very recently, nice about dialog too!)
• Working music system (but no music dialogs)
• Status bar and date system
• Toolbar, money support, exit dialog
• Start of map system
• Built-in Setup program (courtesy of Allegro)
• And various other things

I've managed to build it with DJGPP, Borland C++ (Win32) and gcc (Linux), and it works quite well, except on some systems (in particular Linux with X-Windows) where the frame rate is so slow. It was faster when I didn't have the map, but it's still quite slow.

In future articles, I will update you with the progress of Transport Master, and provide some links to download previous builds of Transport Master. (I haven't got a web page up about TM yet). If you have any comments or queries on Transport Master, please e-mail me at tm@orudge.freeuk.com. You can find my web site at www.owenrudge.co.uk.

Owen Rudge