Packhorse

Status

Last updated: 2026-10-04

What this is

A transport game set in 800-1500: donkey trails, then roads and rivers, then wooden wagonways with lantern signals. All three ages can now be played. Chosen look: "the living landscape" (detailed 3D). Research pages are in research/.

Decisions made

Step 0: look proof (in progress)

Game > Build Look-Proof Valley (UnityProject/Assets/Game/Editor/ValleyBuilder.cs) generates Assets/Game/Scenes/Valley.unity: 2 km terrain, river with a ford, 86,844 trees, a village street, an upland hamlet, a donkey string walking the trail, evening light, tycoon camera.

Frame times on the M4 Pro, in the editor, 2560x1440, 4x MSAA (Game > Run Render Benchmark):

The target is 16.7 ms (60 frames per second).

These figures are from quiet runs and repeat within about 1 ms. While another game was using the GPU on the same Mac, the same benchmark read 30 to 50 ms with identical draw counts and returned to 8 ms afterwards, so a single slow run is not evidence of a regression: run it three times.

Gate result: passed. The first build drew every tree separately, about 50,000 draws per frame; ForestRenderer now sorts trees into 64 m cells and draws each cell in one instanced call.

After the detail pass below, the same views take 9 to 13 ms on a quiet machine: grass, flowers and wheat are drawn near the camera, and leafy tree models are kept out to 750 m (leafDetailMetres on the Forest object; 1000 m costs about 5 ms more in the wide view, 400 m saves about 2 ms).

Detail pass (2026-10-04)

• Firs with tiers of needle boughs instead of plain cones.
• Grass tufts and wild flowers on the meadow, drawn within 170 m of the camera.
• Strip fields beside the village: ripe wheat and ploughed fallow, inside wattle fences.
• Buildings modelled in Blender (tools/blender/build_cottages.py): three cottages and a barn with timber frames, thatch, stone footings, doors, shutters and woodpiles, using CC0 textures.
• A pack donkey modelled in Blender (tools/blender/build_animals.py) with sacks and a pack saddle.

The game: three ages, playable

Game > Build Playable Valley generates Assets/Game/Scenes/Game.unity. A new game can start in 800, 1000 or 1250 (Help panel, then New), and a running game moves on through the years by itself.

• Rules run as a separate, tested engine (Assets/Game/Sim, no Unity types): 202 automated tests. For every batch of new rules the rules were deliberately broken one at a time (22 breaks in the last three batches) and each break failed specific tests.
• Tools appear in the left column as their year arrives: trail, road, rail, signal, tunnel, trading post, and each kind of carrier. A way is planned as the cheapest line between two clicks and priced before it is built.
• Workshops can need two inputs: a bloomery turns iron ore and charcoal into iron, the smithy turns iron into tools. Age II sites are not drawn, named or served until the year 1000.
• Barges follow the river between posts within two tiles of the water; a landing stage appears at each post a barge calls at.
• Wagon trains claim the track ahead up to the next signal, so two trains never share open track. A line with no signals carries one train at a time; each signal lets one more follow. Signals show red or green lamps.
• Tunnels run straight under a hill, with a stone mouth and a cutting at each end.
• Villages grow when supplied, add cottages, and pay up to 50% more.
• My carriers lists everything owned, with go to, re-route and sell.
• Save and Load: a loaded game carries on exactly as the original would have, including trains waiting at signals (tested by saving mid-run and comparing the two games tick for tick).
• Speeds: pause, 1x, 2x, 4x, 8x. A game year is two minutes at 1x.

The look

The default view is now closer to the first concept sketch: a long lens for a flat, map-like angle, warm hazy evening light, round-crowned broadleaf trees, a denser village with red-tiled and thatched roofs and hearth smoke, a stone keep with a banner and a windmill with turning sails.

How it was checked

The Unity editor's remote connection was down for this stretch of work, so the game checks itself: tools/smoke.sh builds the macOS game from the command line and starts it with -smoke. The game then starts an empty valley in 1250, builds posts, roads, a bridge, a signalled rail line and a tunnel through the same commands the tools use, buys one of every carrier, lets it run, takes 30 screenshots and writes a report. The last run: nine carriers of eight kinds all drawn and moving, 88 lengths of rail, two tunnel mouths, two landing stages, both signal lamps seen, 0 errors, about 300 frames a second at 1600x900 on the M4 Pro.

Download

tools/smoke.sh builds and checks the macOS game; tools/build_windows.sh builds the Windows one. tools/package_mac_build.sh and tools/package_windows_build.sh zip them for the status page. The Windows build is made on this Mac and has not been run on Windows.

Since then: closing in on OpenTTD (2026-10-04)

The project is now GPL-2.0 and ports OpenTTD's rules where that helps. docs/OPENTTD-PARITY.md lists every OpenTTD feature against this game. Added in three batches, each tested, each rule broken on purpose to prove its test, each run through the scripted play-through:

• Money: loans in steps of £10 at 4% a year; Books panel with this year and last by account; bankruptcy after twelve months in debt; monthly upkeep of posts, signals, roads and rails.
• Signals and removal: signals can be turned one-way; a Remove tool takes up ways, signals, whole tunnels and unused posts.
• Orders: any number of posts on a round; Full load; Any goods (a carrier finds its own return loads); Copy buys another carrier for the same round.
• Post ratings (ported): each post is rated per cargo by the speed and age of the last carrier, how recently it collected and how much is piled up. Only that share of what is made reaches the post, and none until a carrier has come for it.
• Changing output (ported): farms, mines and quarries make more when well served, less when not.
• Wear and tear (ported): carriers lose reliability between posts, break down, lose value, wear out with age and are replaced at a post when old.
• Subsidies (ported): double pay for a year to the first to serve a neglected route.
• Travellers and letters between settlements.
• Company record: value, a rating out of 1000 in nine parts (ported), graphs by quarter.
• Generated valleys: New can start in the valley being played, the first valley, or one made afresh from a seed (hills, river course, where the village and every industry stand). The land, forest, river and buildings are made by the same code the scene builder uses, and the seed is saved with the game.
• Land, founding, towns: raise and lower the ground; found any industry or a new settlement; new industries appear by themselves about one year in three; pay a settlement for a fair, new houses or a market cross.
• Orders and wagons: per post a carrier can be told No loading, No unloading or Transfer. A transferred load waits at the post for another carrier and is paid on final delivery for the whole journey. A wagon train draws one to eight wagons (more load, less speed). Signals can be set along a whole line in one click. An industry that was founded or appeared and that nobody serves for five years closes.
• Interface: tools in four groups (Build, Carriers, Land, Found); News, Record, a clickable small Map, Lists of carriers, posts and places, three save slots and an autosave each new year.

• Rival companies: a new game can have up to three companies run by the computer. Every post, carrier and way has an owner and every company its own books, loan, record and rating. Trails and roads are open to all; rails, signals and tunnels are their owner's alone. Where two companies collect at one farm they share its output by rating. A subsidy goes to whoever delivers first. A company twelve months in debt is wound up. The computer plays by the same commands as the player: it picks the pair of maker and taker that should pay best, builds two posts and a trail or road, buys mules, ox carts or horse wagons (from 1000 a barge where both ends lie by the river, from 1250 a wagonway with two trains for a long heavy trade), adds carriers where goods pile up, sells carriers that lose money, and keeps its loan in order. Record ranks the companies.

• Playing together: in Saves, one player hosts the game he is in and others join by his address (port 3979). Each joiner gets a company with the starting money of the game's age, and keeps it if he leaves and comes back under the same name. Only the host sets the pace, loads or starts a game. A joiner's command goes to the host and is carried out on every machine after the same tick, so all stay the same game; a monthly sum of the whole game proves it, and a machine that differs is set right from the host's copy. Checked by tools/netsmoke.sh: two copies of the build on one machine play two years together and must end on the same sum.

406 automated tests. Of 215 deliberate rule breaks in these batches, 193 failed a test at once; 17 showed tests that were too weak and were rewritten until they caught the break; five cannot change any outcome (dropping the interest remainder, while loans come in steps whose monthly interest is always a whole penny; and four checks in the computer's player that are made again further on).

Known gaps

• Nobody has played any of this by hand yet. A scripted table (docs/design/balance-2026-10-04.txt, from the BalanceReport test) plays every carrier on routes of 12, 30 and 60 tiles for twelve years under the full rules; after one round of tuning each kind has a route length it suits and a first route pays for itself in one to three years. That is arithmetic, not play.
• The computer's companies lay single-track wagonways without signals, and dig no tunnels.
• A joiner hears whether a command was refused only when the host answers, a moment later; until then the bar says what was asked for, with no price.
• Playing together was checked between two copies on one machine, not yet across a real network.
• Still to do from OpenTTD, largest first: canals and locks, conditional orders and timetables, sound. See docs/OPENTTD-PARITY.md.
• A planned way goes round houses but may cross the village's strip fields, fences and all.
• Saves from before this version (format 12 and older) are refused.
• An industry can be founded, or appear, in the middle of the village's strip fields.
• A tunnel under a low hill has a mouth that stands taller than the hillside behind it.
• The Windows build is made on this Mac and has not been run on Windows.

Next

Our own extras (tolls on roads, seasons and harvest, market days), then canals and locks, timetables and conditional orders, sound.

Source

Private repository: https://github.com/pretjeuh/ttd-deluxe

Status site

tools/progress-site/deploy.sh builds this page from docs/STATUS.md, docs/site/ and the git log, and publishes it to https://packhorse.kroesneger.nl/ on pislik.

Known placeholders

Broadleaf trees are a few smooth lumps and firs are bough cards; the vehicles and people are simple models. Terrain and building textures are CC0 from Poly Haven, prepared by the scripts in tools/.