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/
PAK128.German updated to 2.1.422 Beta
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.
Simutrans Extra #1: Scenario Tutorial Release, Schedule improvements, and more!
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!
New Scenario Tutorial version
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:
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.
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!
Donations opened again to cover server cost
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
That said, if you can't contribute, don't worry! The server will keep running as long as Isaac is alive and well :-)
Simutrans code reach 10 000 revisions!
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:
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!
Termination of Simutrans OTRP development
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.
What is Simutrans OTRP?
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.
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!
Simutrans OTRP and Steam
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.
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.
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.
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.
Goodbye Simutrans OTRP
Let's wish THLeaderH good luck on his new life and let's say goodbye to Simutrans OTRP with some gaming!
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.
Simutrans Extra #0: Tutorial for pak creators, new music backend
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).
Tutorial for pak creators
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.
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.
A new music back-end for Simutrans
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="t6qssbHa8ak;full"]
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.
2021 Wiki Survey on Simutrans
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.
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
That-other-game similar to Simutrans is also coming to Steam
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!
That's all for this Simutrans Extra #0. Happy simutransing!
Announcing the winners of Steam Simutrans Screenshot Contest 2020
The votation has come to and end, and it is now time to announce the winners!
Winners
PAK64
1 - First (and only) winner is "City of Malaga" by Yau.
PAK64.nippon
1 - First winner is Kasukabe Station by danivenk
2 - Second winner is Kanegasaki Station, also by danivenk
3 - Third winner is Kinashi Island, surprisingly by danivenk
Other winners (4-6) can be seen on the pakset steam workshop page - Yoshida Station - Yoshida Station - Underground - Kasukabe Station - Underground
PAK128
1 - The first winner of PAK128 is... ¡"New Harbour" by ayylmayooo (Absolutely Nobody on Steam)! Congratulations!
2 - The second winner is "Zeebrugge" by Lieven. It seems like the jury like ports :P
3 - And the third winner is "Road spaghettis 2", by Lieven. Can you see the beauty in all this disorder?
Other winners of pak128 (4-10) can be seen on Simutrans Main Store Page (alongside the first winners of each category): - City of Brussels 1 - City of Brussels 2 - City of Brussels 3 - Countryside of France - Mining complex - Shigetomi JCT - Wakita Station
PAK128.Britain
1 - The first winner of PAK128 is "Lakebourne transport hub", from Vladki. Simple yet convincing. Congratulations!
2 - The second winner is "Ledbury Main Station" by DThunder518. A great railway system.
3 - And the third winner is "Withernsea Junction". Another great railway system by DThunder518.
Other winners (4-8) can be seen on PAK128.Britain Steam Store Page: - Burnham Mail Facility - Port Jervis - Reigate Airport - Wickwar Airport - Wootton-Basset Airport
PAK128.CS
Unfortunately, PAK128.CS is not yet available via Steam (but it will in the future). I'll leave here the original image links.
1 - The first winner of PAK128.CS is "Near the main station" by Zeruon. So colourful, good job!
1 - The first winner of PAK128.German is... "Oktoberfest needs more beer!" by iGi. I wonder why you choose this.
2 - The second winner is "Alpine City Brentham" by DThunder518 (poor DThunder518 never gets the first position).
3 - And the third position goes to... "Flughafen Torwick", also by DThunder518.
Other winners (4-10) can be seen on the PAK128.German Steam Store Page, and those are: - freight distribution station - Flughafen Oak Bay - Regionalflughafen Oldham - Renton Hauptbahnhof & Renton Westbahnhof (good thing I don't need to pronounce this) - Renwick Center - Garmisch 2 - Ruhrgebiet 3
PAK128.Japan
1 - First (and only) winner of PAK128.japan is "Mountainous Area" by ahakuoku. Congratulations?
Conclusion
I want to give my sincere thanks to every participant - even if you didn't win, you helped Simutrans by submitting your best screenshots so that other (potential) players can apprecite how great Simutrans can be in the hands of experienced players like you. You have also helped to improve the store pages, not only we have new (and better!) screenshots, I remember you that:
- First winner of each category will be displayed on the main Simutrans page (so that players know that other paksets exists by looking at screenshots). - Second winner of each category will be used as the header for the pakset DLC. This is now the header for PAK128.Britain or PAK128.Japan, as examples, which will be visible also on your library and on store searchs: - Third winner will be used as the background of the store page.
For the second winner of PAK128, as changing Simutrans main header is not a good idea (it is very distintive as it is), I thought it was a good idea to use "Zeebrugge" for the "Library Capsule". I really like the result, and now we have a better image for Simutrans on our library main page.
I'm very happy with all the participations we have received this contest, and I look forward to celebrate another contest this year. The only sad thing is that no one participated in the PAK192.Comic category, which is really lacking good screenshots. For now, I have to focus on other things, but that will probably be the theme for the next contest. Until them, happy Simutransing!
Vote now on the Simutrans Steam Screenshot Contest 2020!
Hello Simutrans Community! Thanks to everyone who have submitted screenshots for this first Simutrans Steam Screenshot Contest. Submissions are now closed, and we have over 50 participations from 7 different paksets. It is now time to select the winners! Let's procceed to cast the votes.
Wiki Survey
You can all vote now on the Official Simutrans Wiki survey created for this contest. Remember you can only cast one vote for every pakset. IMPORTANT: Remember that each checkbox corresponds to the image above and not to the image below. Pick the right one ;-)
I will let you below a complete list of participations, so you can see the screenshots at their original quality. I can't include all the images on this post (since some of them are from outside Steam), so you will have to open the link to see the screenshot.
"New Harbour" by ayylmayooo (Absolutely Nobody on Steam)
Surprise! PAK128.German developers have a christmas gift for us all. The new pak128.German version 2.1 (beta) is out this christmas. This is a minor version with mainly bugfixes and some changes:
Patch notes
Some bugs have been corrected. For reporting, thanks to Huperspace on Steam.
English translations improved. Thanks to Duke and Ampersand.
A train now needs a driver at the head. So either in a locomotive or in a control car.
That's why there are now some new control cars. Pushed freight trains are no longer possible.
New: E69, Kö 1 and new silverwagons also with new control car
New: ford for muddy paths, railway barriers now have a German sound.
Changed: some of the ships now have significantly higher freight volumes.
With a current nighlty, level crossings over high-speed tracks or highways can no longer be built.
Deleted: The Tatra T6 A22 tram car is double, is automatically converted to Tatra T6 A6.
The beta is available for Release 122.0 (default), but because of the fords and the level crossings, a current nightly is recommended.
Simutrans Steam Screenshot Contest!
Hello, everyone! I, Roboron, have the great pleasure of opening the first Simutrans Steam Screenshot Contest (or, as I like to call it, "SSSC"). This is also the first contest the Simutrans Community has started in over 4 years, so we are very excited! And we have a good reason. The prize for the winners is... to be displayed on the Steam Store Page!
TL;DR
Participation is opened now. You can submit your screenshots to the "Screenshots" section of the community Hub. You need to include a title and the pakset used. You can submit as many screenshots as you want, until December 21st.
Note: I have updated the game to preventing F12 from displaying the help windows. That treacherous window won't spoil your screenshots anymore!
Participation
1 - There's a category for every pakset (including workshop paksets and the yet unavailable pak128.cs). 2 - You can submit as many screenshots as you want. 3 - You only need to submit your screenshots to the "Screenshots" section of the community Hub. 4 - You need to include title and category (pakset) for every screenshot. Screenshots without title or category will not be eligible. 5 - You have until December 21st to submit your screenshots!
Theme and guidelines
1 - The theme is... Transport structures! (Unoriginal, you say?). Let's show new players what is possible to build with Simutrans. A great train station? Perfect! An amazing road network! Sweet! An underground complex? Wow! A country road with nothing more than grass? Not so impressive... 2 - To keep screenshots clean, try to disable city/station names and avoid showing title bars, overcrowded menus, etc. 3 - While I won't impose any limits to screenshot size, recommended size is 1920x1080 as this is the most common resolution.
Prizes
1 - For the first winner of each category: The screenshot will be displayed on the main Simutrans Store Page, alongside the winners of all categories. 2 - For the second winner of each category: The screenshot will be used as the header for the pakset DLC. 3 - For the third winner of each category: The screenshot will be used as the background of the pakset store page. 4 - For winners 1-10 of each category: The screenshot will be displayed on the pakset store page (or workshop) 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 per category. If two or more screenshots have the same votes, our benevolent dictator will benevolently select a winner, taking into account theme and guidelines.
Participation via other platforms
Apart from Steam, you can participate through the following platforms (don't forget to include title and category):
Twitter: Using the hastag #SimutransSteamScreenshot
The good old forum: Posting your screenshots on this thread
The paksets update
After exposing my thoughts on paksets on the Simutrans on Steam Roadmap, I went back to dicuss changes with the Simutrans Community. My initial idea of bring every pakset independently with his own store page was not as well received as I thought. Then, I opened a survey with different options, and the result of the survey was clear. A majority of members preferred to bring only current, maintained paksets to the store, and let out old, unmaintained paksets. This was not in contradiction with my main idea of totally avoid bundling paksets, so I agreed.
Over the last week I have been silently doing changes to the store page of the paksets, and today changes are live. This means that your current paksets DLC have been replaced by the new ones. Let's see the list of changes:
* Pak128.Britain and Pak64 are the same * Unfortunately, I couldn't get rid of "Workshop Tools" DLC. While I have already published a separate tool called "Simutrans SDK" (you can find it in your library), the workshop uploader utility does not work if it is executed from another appid. This change will require to reimplement the workshop uploader, and I need more time for that. In the future, "Workshop Tools" is intended to be replaced by "Pak128.CS" DLC (currently in development).
What happens to previously available paksets?
Don't panic! Old paksets which were bundled previously together are now available standalone via Workshop https://steamcommunity.com/workshop/browse/?appid=434520&requiredtags[]=pakset
If you wee playing one of those paksets, you will need to install it from the workshop to keep playing. Your savegames will not be lost.
And what more?
I have to remember that the focus was to improve the store pages (and now also offer better default paksets). I have been updating store pages with new descriptions, translations to Spanish, metadata, etc... But something is still required: New screenshots! In the following days, I will announce a new screenshot contest where everyone can participate... and win! The prize will be to be displayed on the Steam Store Page. More details coming soon. Keep an eye on the announcements!
