Simutrans – Transport Simulator
simutrans.com
simutrans.com
What I would really love is for something like a Minecraft but for building trains/managing transport systems. All the games I’ve played treat trains/transport as tools rather than the central focus. But this looks like it’s something along that line; definitely going to check this out along with openttd.
Simutrans appears to work a bit different on that front, I'm going to have to take a closer look.
For added challenge, try the FIRS mod, which requires your production chains to be working from raw materials to production to retail. A lot more planning is needed to make things run smoothly and on time.
Ive been toying around with trying to learn Unity or Godot to build something like this.
It leans less to the "model railroad" side of things and more towards the "Railroad Tycoon" economic simulator, but it does seem to have solid multiplayer support.
1. The clockwork. The time tables and planning are like gears on a civilization scale machine. A gear so big that from the first person perspective you can't even see its a gear.
2. Infrastructure is politics by other means. Concrete and steel are the only things that outlive even the supreme court justices. What gets built dictates so much about where people will live and how they will live, and sometimes these decisions are the result of lengthy deliberations and sometimes they are the result of the selfish wants of an unaccountable planner.
3. The optimization problem of it all. It's so easy to obsess over the map, seeing all those cross town trips that would be so much easier if some existing line just went slightly further. Trying to understand why lines get built where they do.
Building games let you build up your hoard of stuff (whether trains, rails, buildings, tiberium silos, green circuits, …) in a tight feedback loop that repeatedly triggers the “this is my stuff, now I am safe” dopamine response.
This also explains collecting hobbies, and goes some way towards explaining the desire for wealth acquisition in general.
The sequel (Cities in Motion 2) is more expansive, but the original has its own charm.
I don't know if OpenTTD allows it but in the original TTD it was possible to plop down factories at will (but not mines, farms or oil wells).
1. It uses the real world map and tries to figure out population data too
2. There’s no grid. You control the rails with precise Bezier curves, that affect the train speed
Very young and very experimental/ bare-bones, but still something to check out if you’re into the genre
- OpenTTD: free, open source, has a variety of transport, even crashes, low hardware requirements, but personally the train tiles aren't easy on the eyes
- Transport Fever (1 or 2): lovely games that have really detailed 3D graphics, the UI/UX in TF2 is the best that i've every played with, however the train pathing doesn't appear to be dynamic, only simple signals present
- Mashinky: a mix like the both of the above, developed by a single person, allows switching between an isometric tile based build mode and 3D visualization, currently has a variety of trains and some road vehicles, switches are automatically placed (either chain or regular switches, really nice logic); some might dislike its economy system (some trains need certain resources to run, which you need to get through supply chains, possibly with other trains), but i really like it
- Railway Empire: focuses only on trains, seemingly the older variety too, has a large amounts of maps and interesting city growth mechanics but the UI isn't as good as TF2 and even though it has perhaps the best track building mechanics, managing lines becomes cumbersome when you have many
- Workers & Resources: a city building game with a rather nice transport system, the UI needs work, but it might eventually be up there with Cities: Skylines (at least based on what others say)
- Derail Valley: this one lets you actually be inside of a train and transport cargo, has crashes, simulates engine temperature for electric locomotives, even lets you use steam locomotives as well, really interesting
Suggestion: you should be able to pick up most of these on Steam IIRC, so feel free to look them up and wishlist them. I actually got TF1 in a sale for just a few euros a while back.
As a first thought I imagined my laptop being heated up more when the locomotive does too... Technically even do-able I guess :)
Thanks for the list!
I have an irrational love for that game, I discovered the original (TTD) as a teen so it will forever be "that game".
I also really love Cities Skyline, but I've got a grip about how car-centric the game is.
It's not possible to create a city that mostly bikes for instance, you _have_ to allow cars everywhere (or go into mods territory, not my thing)
There's plenty of games about building cities, but I've never played a game that really challenges you to understand the throughput and layout of road networks as skylines does. That said, I can see how people could get blindsided by it. You want to make a nice city and instead you're browsing wikipedia for how to make interchanges.
You can create car-free city with a single mod, the one that allows you to restrict the traffic types from each road segments... it's a giant pain though, cause you have to restrict cars from each and every road segment, if you forget some short path a car will appear out of nowhere and drive on it :) Surprisingly, it actually mostly works (although puts you in the hole money wise).
Although, unfortunately you have to have roads in front for deliveries, because there's no such thing as deliveries from the back. So, pedestrian-only streets are pretty much impossible if you want a city that actually functions.
But man, there's something really off-putting about downloading from Sourceforge. I can't put my finger on it, but it seems scammy.
They were caught adding malware to installers. As in the installers you downloaded were modified to have an extra "Do you also want to install yahoo toolbar" step when installing.
https://www.infoworld.com/article/2610419/retro-repo-sourcef...
They since stopped. But the reputation damage persists to this day.
They are the ones who removed that, in a stated effort to put SF back on the right track. They don't deserved to be maligned for their efforts.
https://github.com/hsanjuan/go-dcc
Digitalizing locos with DCC decoder chips is mostly possible and a good exercise.
Although the exciting software is to remotely control the cars, written in Delphi, but they haven't published these (understandably). They're even working on an F1 race with cars that will decide to overtake themselves: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bVQa1DYJqBs (subtitles available), he said, 16 core CPU, well, there you go, 16 car brains!
Pak96.HD is an art of its own kind - It is completely drawn by hand using pencil and paper. Each image of each object was first hand drawn on paper to be later digitalised and become a real Simutrans object.
[0] - https://youtube.com/watch?v=r9obpifVR40&list=PL8B83EB2119AE7...
It appears to be three niche AVs, two of which don't claim to explain what they found and the third which says that it's "W32.AIDetect.malware2" which appears to mean their AI model thinks it's malware.
Personally I wouldn't read much into that. Plenty of mainstream AVs have false positives on even commercially released software or open source built by trusted sources, and yet here they all agree it's safe.
If instead we consider actual releases, there are a few open source projects that are still in 0.xxx but for which each point release could be considered a an actual release. A sibling comment mentioned ClamAV, but there is also MAME (currently ad 0.240).
This is called ZeroVer: https://0ver.org/ (most recent HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28154187).
2. The economic model is deeper (in the default paksets, which are like TTD's GRFs). The biggest difference is that it has what was referred to in the TTD space as "cargodest" cargo is generated with a destination somewhere on the map, so to get the most cargo you need to build a bigger network.
This is not to be confused with OpenTTD's "cargo distribution" which is a somewhat watered down version where cargo only chooses from destinations already on your network, so the routes are split among all stations you connect up. In OpenTTD, even with cargodist, if you only have two stations for a good to go between, 100% of the source station will go to the destination station. In Simutrans, you'll have a lower input volume until you connect up more.
Also I would also love for cargo being able to be transferred between competitors. Ideally natively (for passengers at least) if the stations are near enough.
It's a setting in the config file (you can also modify the connectedness, i.e. how many partners a factory picks when it's generated).
There's also a "cheat" tool to manually force a connection in the game.
The last one was abandoned in favour of cargodist because:
> - This form of routing cargo has a much different game play effect than cargo dist.
> - The current implementation is too expensive in CPU time, you'll hit CPU limits too soon (the current game already has this problem)
> - There is no easy road to reduce that CPU cost (at least nobody found one so far)
I'm not sure why it's considered too expensive for OpenTTD, but not for Simutrans. It might be because of the larger map size options, something inherent to the way the TTD map is structured, or just OpenTTD's desire to maintain it's "runs on a toaster" status.
You might find some patch packs that will work in the OpenTTD development forum that include YACD[2].
[1]: https://www.tt-forums.net/viewtopic.php?t=54253&start=380
I usually don't play on my computer nowadays, but I guess I can make an exception.
I wonder how does it compare to OpenTTD so I downloaded it and complete OpenTTD takes 23MB
TTD, Sim City 2000 and UFO: Enemy unknown were probably my most favorite games ever