Immutable industry patch for OpenTTD

If you ever played the transport simulation game OpenTTD, you might have been disappointed by the default behavior of the game, which consists in closing industries that have not been serviced for several years. To get out of this frustration, we offer a solution.

While it is understood that this features is needed to keep the game balanced, this is especially embarassing when you are playing scenarios or height maps, in which industries are typically located in strategic or other realistic locations. This is even more annoying when this happens just after you opened your first service line to the industry.

To offer an alternative to the situation, we created a patch that prevents any type of industry to ever close. And to keep the game fair and balanced, the patch is also preventing any new industry from being randomly added to the map. Because it is provided as a patch, one has to recompile the game to use it, but this has the advantages of:

• being multi-platform
• being always available, as long as the modified executable is used; this is useful if several players play together on a network

The patch is known to work with the latest version of OpenTTD, version 1.2.3, without any issue. There is no graphical configuration available yet, but one may still add or remove open and close flags from the file src/industrytype.h.

For the time being, the limitations are the following:

• after playing for some time, industries not serviced will have a production near to zero, instead of having closed. Production can still be stimulated by servicing them, although this may take a while
• opening of new industries is actually disabled only if all the industries have the flag INDUSTRYBEH_CANT_OPEN set

The patch is released under the terms of the GPLv3 license and was announced on the official Transport Tycoon forums under our profile. We hope you'll enjoy your games using it.