Decoded: OpenTTD

OpenTTD is a free, open-source recreation of the Chris Sawyer masterpiece: Transport Tycoon. I lost many hours playing this after opening it for Christmas in 1994. (alongside Outpost, and Global Domination -- thanks, dad!)

The three goals for this project: Share steps that beginners can follow to take apart any large open-source project Do it by example with OpenTTD Add an active, intermediate-difficulty project to my library of decoded work

This project deviates from my usual practice of documenting every line of code. It's not practical to take apart over 200,000 lines, especially for an actively developed project. Instead, I will pick and choose the key ideas that an aspiring contributor may want to dig in to. Above all, this exercise should be transferable to other projects.

I'm looking at the code base with fresh eyes in order to relate my learning approach with beginners who struggle to dig in to similarly large projects. I hope to make this as useful as possible in two weeks of decoding effort against a project that dozens of professionals built over the last 15 years.

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