Simutrans News

Welcome, everyone! The second Simutrans Steam Screenshot Contest (in short, "SSSC") is about to begin! The first SSSC was celebrated a year ago, and it is now time to celebrate another one to end this year with joy. This time the scope will not be as wide as the first one, and the SSSC will be focused around pak192.comic (to compensate for the lack of participation in this category in the first SSSC). Hopefully this will increase competition as there is only one category! Let the best win!

Terms are pretty similar to the first SSSC, and the winners will be also displayed on the Steam Store Page!

Participation
1 - There's only one category: pak192.comic. If you have never played pak192.comic before, you can get it from the in-game pakset downloader, the Steam Store, or directly from their GitHub repository.
2 - You can submit as many screenshots as you want.
3 - You need to include title for every screenshot. Screenshots without title will not be eligible!
4 - You have until Januay 15st (inclusive) to submit your screenshots!

Theme and guidelines
1 - The theme this year is... Vehicles! pak192.comic team put a lot of love into their vehicles recently, specially rail vehicles. Show us how they run around your networks!
2 - To keep screenshots clean, try to disable city/station names and avoid showing title bars, overcrowded menus, etc.
3 - There are no limits to screenshot size, but recommended size is 1920x1080 as this is the most common resolution.

Remember that you can submit screenshots that do not fit the theme or guidelines just for the sake of showing others your work, but theme and guidelines will be used to select the winners!

Prizes
1 - For the first winner : The screenshot will be displayed on the main Simutrans store page.
2 - For the second winner: The screenshot will be used as the header for the Pak192.comic DLC.
3 - For the third winner: The screenshot will be used as the background of the Pak192.comic store page.
4 - For winners 1-10: The screenshot will be displayed on the Pak192.comic store page page.

Voting
Voting will be done on a wiki survey (I will post a new announcement when the time comes). Everyone (participants and non-participants) can vote, but you can only vote one time.
If two or more screenshots have the same votes, our benevolent dictator will benevolently select a winner, taking into account theme and guidelines.

Submission
You can submit your screenshot through the following platforms (don't forget to include title):

• Steam: submitting your screenshots to the "Screenshots" section of the community Hub
  
• The International Simutrans Forum: Posting your screenshots to this thread.
  
• Reddit: Submitting your screenshots to /r/simutrans/

The beta contains a new price model, with fixed costs of about 2% of revenue.
For this, the purchase prices of the vehicles were halved.
Also included are the new harbors and tramways.

Welcome to Simutrans Extra! Some months has passed since the previous one (If you missed it, you can read it here) and it's now time to sum up what has been happening under the hood. There are some exciting news!


The first new is that community member Yona has released a new version of the Scenario Tutorial (v1.6.01)available for pak64 and pak128. This version, which I've been involved myself with correction and translation of texts, aims to be the final version included in the next stable release (if no major bugs are found). Let's take a look at the list of changes:

• The version and pakset name check is implemented.
  
• Many improvements in translations and text files.
  
• Tunnel issues fixed.
  
• Some numerical values are changed to variables in the texts.
  
• Many fixes and improvements.
  
• Some code cleaning.
  

For compability reasons, the new version here on Steam is only available on the [nightly] beta branch. If you find any problems, please report them on:

=> Pak128 Scenario Tutorial Thread (International Forums)
=> Scenario Tutorial pak64 (International Forums)


The Schedule windows is getting a rework, and scheduled departures are finally arriving to Simutrans! Let's take a closer look to the current implementation that Lead Developer prissi did.



You can now select between Minimum Load and an extra waiting time or Fixed Monthly Departures with N departures equally divided alongside the month, starting on a given day. Doesn't it look exciting?

Take in mind that this could change until the final version that you will see on Simutrans 123.

=> Leave feedback on this thread.


Another interesting change is that you will be able to change the position of the toolbar from the Display Settings to the left, the right, and bottom, further allowing the player to customize their Simutrans experience.



All of those changes will be coming on Simutrans 123. They are also available now for testing on the [nightly] beta branch, so you can test them right now. But be careful, since compatibility of saves between versions is not guaranteed!

End of "Development Diaries" kind of news. Let's jump onto another things!


While Simutrans is a free game developed by people like me in their free time, unfortunately maintaining and running the servers that host Simutrans infrastructure is not free. Our benevolent dictator Isaac Eiland-Hall has been kindly providing his own resources to the community in this regard, but occasionally he opens donations to help cover server running costs.
If you have some spare money to spend and you would like to help Simutrans, you can donate some money for the server costs

=> More info about donations.

That said, if you can't contribute, don't worry! The server will keep running as long as Isaac is alive and well :-)


Yesterday the code of Simutrans reached 10 000 "revisions" (aka "contributions" as called by SVN), a nice, round number that doesn't mean anything by itself. But for a "small" project like Simutrans, this number is impressive. Nearly 1 000 contributions of those 10 000 (10%) were made in the last year, which gives a nice picture of a project well alive.
First revision was made on August 2006, for version 84.20, 15 years ago, when the game was handed to the Simutrans Team. Of course, the game is older than that, but there are no logs of the changes made before that date, as it was closed source back then.

If you are curious, revision 10 000 was made by developer ceeac, and it was a boring fix. Here is it:

=> Revision 10000: "FIX: Random seed sometimes saved differently on client and headless server"


That's all for this Simutrans Extra. I've been myself busy porting the current Build System to CMake and some other minor changes not worth mentioning (like putting the Options button on the initial banner). I should probably work next on the new Workshop Uploader, as I'd like to have it finished before the end of the year, but I can't promise anything. I hope you are enjoying your holidays and playing Simutrans!

Happy simutransing!

Today I have to bring you bad news for the first time. Simutrans OTRP (a popular Simutrans fork from the japanese community) will stop being developed by THLeaderH, the original author of this project and the main developer, since he has ended their studies and will start working full-time.



Let's pause a moment an explain a bit what Simutrans OTRP is, since this is the first time is it mentioned on Steam. Simutrans OTRP is a modified version of Simutrans with additional features compared to the standard version.

• You can now build one-way, two-lane roads. Vehicles can overtake each other on these roads. As a result, you can construct 4-lane highways.
  
• "Citycars do not enter" and "avoid becoming cityroad" options are available for roads.
  
• When using the building construction and land raise/lower tools, it is possible to click and drag to to apply the tool over a specified area. This greatly simplifies large-scale development.
  
• Advanced scheduling options allow for precise control of your convoys and lines.
  

=> You can learn more about Simutrans OTRP on the project repository.



The OTRP fork will probably stop receiving updates, unless someone else pick up the project. But don't worry, current Simutrans OTRP version (v29_5) is based on Simutrans Standard Nightly, so it will take some time until Simutrans OTRP is truly outdated compared with Simutrans Standard, and in any case, you will always be able to play it if only with older paksets. You have plenty of time to enjoy it!



I'm a big fan of bringing other Simutrans forks here on Steam, so they are more accesible to players and hopefully thrive. Indeed, that was point 7 of the Roadmap I made when I became the new Steam maintainer.

=> Simutrans on Steam Roadmap

I already did that (silently) for Simutrans Extended (I promise I will talk about it another day), but doing the same for Simutrans OTRP required additional work. Following the announcement of the termination of the development, this seems a good time to finish it. Simutrans OTRP is now available from Steam (just go to betas and select the "otrp" branch).

Additionally to the usual Steam benefits (workshop, cloud save, etc) the Simutrans OTRP version on Steam does not include telemetry, unlike the official OTRP which collected some information and sent it to a japanese server. This was necessary for EU users to be able to play the game.

IMPORTANT: I have not obtained permission (yet) to redistribute the ribi-arrow pak required for Simutrans OTRP, so you still need to download it manually and put it on your pakset folders.

=> Ribi-arrow pak download on Google Drive

This is the reason I was taking so long to bring OTRP to Steam, since I wanted to offer an out-of-the-box experience. Please refer to the install instructions for more info.

=> Simutrans OTRP Install Instructions

No manual installation needed anymore, paksets include necessary Ribi-arrow files and the key ":" is configured. The "otrp" beta branch will not receive any more updates, allowing you to switch it to any moment and play otrp with the latest compatible paksets.



Let's wish THLeaderH good luck on his new life and let's say goodbye to Simutrans OTRP with some gaming!

=> Original announcement on the forum


P.D.: Please do NOT report bugs for Simutrans OTRP here on Steam (and any beta branch at all). I will delete any bug that is not about game not launching. Other kind of bugs (such gameplay bugs) will only be considered for Simutrans Standard.

There's a lot of things happening on the Simutrans Community that are not Steam-related news or updates, and I know that most of you don't bother to check the forums, so let's inaugurate a section called "Simutrans Extra" with the latest news from the community delivered to you monthly (or whenever is something interesting to tell).



Let's start this first Simutrans Extra with something great. Have you ever wanted to make a Simutrans add-on? Do you have a building that you have always wanted to see in-game but you don't know how that works? Well, the pak192.comic developer "Leartin" is now writing a step-by-step detailed tutorial about the process of creating Simutrans objects.

=> [Tutorial] You got a graphic - now what?

If you end up creating something worth, don't forget to share it with the community! You can even ask pakset creators to include your objects, or share them independently as add-ons, for example by submitting them to the Simutrans Steam Workshop.



From some time ago, music playback on Linux and MacOS has been broken. To address this, I've developed myself a new music back-end that will address the music problem on both systems, and also add some advances features like MIDI soundfont selection! Here's a short video showing it capabilities:

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

This new music back-end will be available on the next Steam stable release for Linux & MacOS. Windows release will probably keep using the same old backend, as it works out-of-the-box without the need of including a soundfont. Nightly releases won't include this either.



Every year the wiki celebrates a survey to gather information about Simutrans players. This information is really helpful for developers, and while I can gather some information from Steam, it's not as useful as this wiki survey, so please go there and fill the survey if you want.

=> 2021 : Simutrans Players



DThunder (you know, the user who never get the first position in the screenshot contest), have started a new server called "128 World" for pak128 players

=> Discussion on the forum



That-other-game which is Similar to Simutrans is (finally) coming to Steam. Hopefully, people will stop wrongly posting content of that-other-game in our Steam Hub. Anyway, we wish that-other-game developers luck here on Steam!

=> Steam Announcement of that-other-game


That's all for this Simutrans Extra #0. Happy simutransing!