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Is Simutrans dying?

Started by Commander Noddy, February 06, 2017, 06:26:49 AM

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Commander Noddy

Lets have a discussion here. I think simutrans is not as hit as before. When I first play simutrans, I remember that new posts will be in the forum daily. But Now..... Anyway just my opinion. What do you guys think?

May The Force Be With You Always!

prissi

That is very difficult to say. Also related websites (ttdforums.net) have less traffic compared to five years back. A problem certainly is, that there have no new releases for a year now. Still about 1400 downloads a month (you need to divide the number in the image by two, since it counts the installer and the executable as two separate downloads).

But maybe forums are too old fashined. I am no social media versed enough to know what on the social front could be achieved. But that may contribute too.

And, more positively, Simutrans is very mature, so less cryptic handling and less bug reports. Also more documentation is floating around, with lots of videos.

Still historically Simutrans and OpenTTD go like 3:1 for a long time, and both are reducing.
https://www.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=openttd,simutrans,%2Fm%2F0rytz2s

Maybe a mobile app would change a little. Certainly on my todo list. But first a new release is overdue (and hopefully finished soon).

Leartin

So you are questioning why there would be a decline in usership/community_activity around a 20 year old piece of software?  :o

Okay, let's for a moment assume it's not totally natural for people to go on to new, shiny things, and say Simutrans actually has a problem. If so, I can see several reasons why:


  • There are many, many games out there. In this day and age, with the tools available, one can create a little game within hours. And thanks to the internet, all of them are accessable. Therefore, it's hard to find any particular game, like Simutrans, unless you are explicitly looking for it.
  • Simutrans ist a Jack of all Trades - and Master of None. What IS Simutrans, really? What would any potential player be looking for to find it?
    A TTD-Clone? - No, cause Simutrans can't compete with OTTD in TTD-'Cloneness'. This is a big chunk of potential players who will likely play OTTD instead.
    A very complex simulation? - Simutrans prides itself with it's complex industry chains and pax destinations in comparison to OTTD and other games of the genre. However, they are not actually that complex. Just compare Simutrans Industry with Factorio factories. It's essentially the same, though Factorio is more complex. So if a player wants that complexity, they would play something like Factorio. (Or Dwarf Fortress. Or Paradoxian Grand Strategy...)
    Is Simutrans a Railway Simulator? - Sure, without physics, or curves, or more than two degrees of slopes, and really tiny models. I saw Facebookgames with more detailed trains.
    Is Simutrans a Sandbox (with trains)? - That's probably what I use it for. But there are not many Sandbox options, unless you use the editor, which is "cheating"/creative mode. If you want a Sandbox game, you go for Cities Skylines or even Planet Coaster. Or you go for an older SimCity or RollerCoaster Tycoon 2 if you want to stay isometric. Both of which are, in many aspects, better Sandboxes.
    Don't get me wrong, nothing Simutrans does it does completely wrong. But since even the active developers (both programming and artists/pak-devs) respectfully disagree on what Simutrans is, it can't really find it's niche where it is best.
  • So, someone was bored with the Master of a Trade and looked at other options, which Simutrans was one, as a Jack. But Simutrans is not exactly an easy game, and there is no ingame tutorial yet. So players will start a new game, and if they actually find out they need to build a depot somewhere buried in the middle of a long row of buttons (in most paks, anyway), they might go bankrupt rather quickly, and they don't know why, and nobody tells them. Maybe Youtube, but have you seen anyone play Simutrans on Youtube who was really good at it? Why would a potential player go through all the frustration if they just can go over to the next Jack, which might be a worse game, but at least easy to understand and with pretty graphics.
  • Graphics. Yeah. Terrible. Not any single graphic on it's own, but... *sigh*
    pak64, the standard pak for normal download, is rather good. Because it is so small, things like "style" don't matter as much, and everything looks rather consistent. But it's just so... tiny. An HD remake might be in order, like for AoE or HoMM3.
    Well, that would be pak128 I guess - standard on steam. While it is bigger, the problem with that pak is that the differences in style are more appearent, probably because there are no 'rules' on what it has to look like. I think it was a creater named Napik whose stuff has that old-render-look, while some other elements look like they are pixelled. An inconsistent mess, sadly - and thus not really good-looking.
    Other paksets do look more consistent. Especially the Brits, since they have all those well-defined render settings and almost everything exists as a 3D model to be re-rendered if needs be. Pak96.comic looks very consistent due to the simple drawing rules, and pak192.comic becomes quite consistent due to... well, pretty much every vehicle going through Flemmbrav and pretty much everything else through me... But I don't think any comic-pakset could be a standard for Simutrans, and the british one is more or less SimEx-Standard and not universally liked either. And I'm not sure if any of them is complete enough.

    However, graphics would be only an artists problem. We artists got a lot of new tools from the devs recently, and there is more to come it seems. Does not mean we can change everything instantly, but let's just say most graphics-related deficits are not the programmers fault ;)
  • Now, IF we found some consent on what Simutrans ought to be and improve it to become the Master of that Trade... I don't think it would help too much with user decline anyway. Maybe it would extend the lifespan, but we would probably only find 'more' users respectively to other, similar games, and never convert any of those battlefield/witcher/supermario players. So yeah, I guess once we - the players who like the game enough to still be a community in this forum - die, the game will die as well. Until then, I would only ever talk about a "decline" ;)


AP

I suspect more than a few players are patiently waiting for the next release of Simutrans Extended / Experimental - which is still a while off - having outgrown some of the limitations of the vanilla version.

jomoyama

Not "Simutrans is better in the good old days." but "You enjoyed Simutrans at that time."
Simutrans itself is as fun as ever.

Isaac Eiland-Hall


https://i.imgur.com/PDxAYGn.png

You can argue posts are down a bit, but page views remain steadyish, and new topics, too. But we had the most "most online" in 2016. So it just depends on how you look at it. It's not a huge difference any way you look at it, I don't think.

DrSuperGood

Since double heights was added development of standard has slowed quite a lot. It is mostly random fixes, changes and maintenance now. Additionally development on pak64 and 128 has stopped almost completely and they feel far from completed/polished.

Experimental seems to be developing a lot faster than standard at the moment, although as its name implies it is not that stable or playable at times.

Simutrans is not that "finished". It still has a lot of polishing work and some missing features to go. For example its multiplayer synchronization needs a checkpoint system to stop disconnects due to latency spikes. Elevated ways still have inconsistent build mechanics. Many of the tools still do not correctly finance check.

jamespetts

This is an interesting discussion and worth having with some careful thought and introspection. My own perspective will be largely driven from the Simutrans-Experimental side of things, but that is worth considering, too. There are a greater number of competing games now than there were years ago (the mid-2010s seems to be the heyday of the independent game), and, interestingly, many of those are "retro" games that emulate games from the 1990s - the very era that Simutrans is actually from. The age of the game itself ought not to be a reason for it to become less popular, especially if it is continuously developed and enhanced, although the additional competition might be.

There is to an extent an important feedback loop: the more popular that Simutrans is, the more people who will play it, a small fraction of whom might go onto help with development and/or publicity, thus improving the game or its advertising, making it yet more popular (and more enjoyable for those who already play it).

Simutrans could probably do with more social media presence as Prissi indicates; the forums are useful for discussion between established community members, recording information and welcoming and helping new people, but they do not fulfil the same sort of functions as social media. There is a Simutrans 'blog and Facebook group, but I do not think that either are very active. (And this returns to the feedback issue, as the inactivity may well be due in part to the lack of people available to do this).

Youtube is another relevant outlet in two ways: firstly, it can be a useful means of advertising Simutrans (there is already an independent Youtuber who has Simutrans content: look at Shining Sword Gaming; Youtube is a very popular outlet for gaming at present) and it can also be a good way of providing tutorials. Tutorials are important to allow players to learn about the game more quickly and easily and with less frustration. Youtube tutorials are probably easier to produce than in-game tutorials. I have started using Youtube for tutorials for Simutrans-Experimental, and this seems to be quite popular.

Turning to the more substantive considerations (and focussing on Simutrans-Expermiental, since that is what I know the most), the aim is for Simutrans-Experimental to find a very specific niche not occupied, so far as I know, by any other transport game, which is of a transport simulation that is highly realistic (both economically and operationally), that can be played in semi-persistent large online games (perhaps being reset after a year or so, depending on the in-game timeline) with a multitude of other players with interesting and realistic emergent game-play. In particular, I am keen for the game to have both great depth and great breadth, a feat not possible with more modern game engines that use 3d graphics (which take far longer to produce, reducing the number of graphics that can be produced) and fully agent-based simulations (which take far too much CPU time to allow for massive maps that also have lots of local detail). I want players to be able to enjoy setting up a detailed pattern of local 'bus routes in a town and a realistic network of airline routes (which I hope will be much more interesting when I eventually introduce a portals feature allowing very long-distance overseas transport without increasing the map size) which interact with each other in realistic and interesting ways in the same map. I do not believe that any game in existence or that is known to be being planned does anything like this.

This is why I am concentrating on fixing problems in multi-player gaming, spent a long time last year implementing multi-threading (so as to allow for good performance on very large maps), and am focussing on the things that will allow me at last to undertake a comprehensive exercise of economic balancing. It is unfortunate that the development is taking such a long time, but that is the result of there being few other people helping with coding at the present time and me being a self-taught amateur in that respect.

However, what I do plan to do in the near-term is adopt a modern practice in respect of Simutrans-Experimental: to switch to an early access model of development. I had planned to drop the "Experimental" name and replace it with "Extended" some time ago, but have not been able to do so yet, since what is still officially the current release version is still named internally "Simutrans-Experimental".

The plan is to deprecate those old releases from 2013, and instead focus on nightly automated builds, where players can download the latest development version of what will be "Simutrans-Extended" (the new name avoiding confusion). The current state of the computer game industry shows that players are often happy to play an incomplete version of a game that is under active development under the "early access" model. In fact, these builds will probably be more stable and better balanced than the old release builds on the 11.x branch from 2013 because of the amount of development work that has gone into them since then.

Finally making the new name official will allow me to set up social media accounts in which I can post short messages about the latest development work regularly, and will also make it easier for me to refer to the name in the Youtube videos. These videos can have the dual purpose of being advertisements for Simutrans-Extended as it will be and tutorials for existing players, by using the distinctive style of the old British Transport Films from the 1950s/1960s which were themselves often either detailed instructions for transport personnel, as in Single Line Working, more artistic endeavours showcasing transport infrastructure, such as Terminus, or documentaries educating the public about transport, such as Inland Waterways. I am also considering making a tutorial video about how to make new objects for the pakset, which might make people interested in creating things to improve the pakset.

This is why I am so particularly keen to get cross-compiling to work: any assistance that anyone can give with this would be much appreciated.
Download Simutrans-Extended.

Want to help with development? See here for things to do for coding, and here for information on how to make graphics/objects.

Follow Simutrans-Extended on Facebook.

Commander Noddy

In fact, I love Simutrans so much and played for many years already. Yes, Simutrans is somehow special camparing other related games, such as Simcity, Cities Skylines, OpenTTD, etc. However, Simutrans has a relatively special feature -- combining different elements and further extensions and development can be done by other players. I have to admit that Simutrans is not as hit as other games, but I think it has kept the most unforgettable game experience from it:)

Anyway, I want to thank the hardwork of all admin and modders which has given the game so unique and special. Thank You All!

May The Force Be With You Always!

Sarlock

I think it's much simpler:

Forum activity is largely proportional to how active the devs/artists are at any given time.  The bulk of forum conversation is from a handful of regular members who are active participants when there are topics to be discussed, debated, etc.  Observe the spike in forum activity when James is actively working on Sim-Ex (he accounts for half of our total forum posts, doesn't he? :D )
Current projects: Pak128 Trees, blender graphics

isidoro

I agree that forum activity seems lower than before.  My guess is that, for instance, some traditions like the screenshot monthly contests were dropped.  Those made a steady flow of posts every month.

Development, at least in Standard, seems somewhat stalled or, at least, there aren't any big projects at sight.  Traffic increases when new ideas/projects appear.  Just now, when a new overtaking patch is discussed, activity seems to come to life again...

Not to mention that we don't have problems/discussions we had some time ago.  But I'd say that that is unwanted traffic, isn't it?  Now the forum seems like an old river: broad, quiet, peaceful...  Nothing in common with the young river: narrow, quick, tumultuous...

DrSuperGood

Technically development has stalled in preparation for another release. One is meant to be coming soon to roll out a lot of the changes/fixes made last year. However nothing is ever that simple so until then I will be cautious with new feature development.

Carl

A small thing to add: the western Simutrans community is not the only one. If you've ever searched for Simutrans on twitter, you'll see that (a) 99% of the posts are Japanese, and (b) people are sharing lots of content all the time - at least as much as we see on this forum.


I've been a little surprised in the last year or two how few people we have sharing custom addons, screenshots, and savegames.


jamespetts

One thing that I do notice is that, whenever there is a major bug in Simutrans-Experimental, I am contacted (both on the forum and by e-mail) by a number of people who are usually quite quiet here.
Download Simutrans-Extended.

Want to help with development? See here for things to do for coding, and here for information on how to make graphics/objects.

Follow Simutrans-Extended on Facebook.

Manche

Quote from: Commander Noddy on February 06, 2017, 06:26:49 AM
Lets have a discussion here. I think simutrans is not as hit as before. When I first play simutrans, I remember that new posts will be in the forum daily. But Now..... Anyway just my opinion. What do you guys think?

The words from one of Japanese users, simutrans is glowing, progressing and evolving, "NOW".

"simutrans will go to decay", is this truth?
Every data are show the fact, "simutrans is now a live".

If you think "simutrans is dying", you should make add-ons, create maps, let introduce to your friends about simutrans and evolve simutrans to future.
You can do action, now.
Ye, Olde, simutrans Player, from 2004.
In Japanese, "Manche" is spelled "まんちぇ".
Sometimes provide translation and addons.

Discord: MancheHeckens#4830

An_dz

This is late, but I just want to include that in the latest months I've added a lot more robots to the list used by the forum software. This reduces the number of users as those are not considered in statistics.

Some crawlers/bots are kept like RSS feed readers, which crawl for users to view our forum.

badwithnames14

Well for one thing making people hunt to find the link to the forum probably isn't helping. The main download page could benefit from a button right at the top saying forum, which it currently lacks. http://www.simutrans.com/en/

Oh and hi, I'm new, honestly I barely know what I'm doing in this game. It's got quite the learning curve, and even with my on and off trying for more than a year I have found a way to confidently build a company up past a few lines before ending up bankrupt (Although I do have a good run going in the New York scenario, I'm a bit stuck on where to expand though). So yeah an ingame tutorial would be very useful, I doubt most people would put as much time and effort as I did before moving on. 

I'm honestly in awe at the people who manage to build up those massive cities, they must take so much time and effort.

jamespetts

Hello, and welcome! Making the link to the forums seem more prominent seems like a good idea to me.
Download Simutrans-Extended.

Want to help with development? See here for things to do for coding, and here for information on how to make graphics/objects.

Follow Simutrans-Extended on Facebook.

An_dz

It may be an annoyance to new forum members, but it's unrelated. The new site is one year old, and the average posting is roughly the same for years. Actually this month has twice as much posts as last year, and there's still a week.

The daily posts as Commander Noddy points have always been done by the old members, we always had a low number of new users posting, and they generally post on the help area. Which don't develop into lengthy discussions anyway.

sdog

Quote from: jamespetts on February 07, 2017, 12:06:00 PM
Simutrans could probably do with more social media presence as Prissi indicates; [...]
An-dz was breathing some life into the then dormant facebook account. However, getting quality posts that engage users is quite a lot of work, and requires to follow progress very closely, and there needs to be something exciting to report. In particular on the graphics side. If more user engagement is desired, it cannot be placed only on his shoulders.

The blog is hardly useful in the way social media networks are, but it serves a good purpose uniting our social media presence and providing an archive, that might turn up in deep searches. Are there any access numbers? In particular for old posts?

Quote
Youtube is another relevant outlet in two ways: firstly, it can be a useful means of advertising Simutrans [...]

Youtube is excellent. The caveat is that creating content requires much more work, skill, proper English, and a good microphone. Youtube also requires a lot of moderation, unless one can accept all the filth that accumulates in comments there.

We do have a youtube channel, without content, but already 19 followers.

The best content to spread the news of Simutrans are highly unonventional projects like Carl Baker's meticulous replication of the entire British rail network. But that also needs a follow up to show people who stumble over it, that there's a fun game behind it, one may play without Carl's devotion.

Quote
it can also be a good way of providing tutorials.
Tutorials are wonderful when done properly. Which is even harder than lets plays or advertorial content.

I do hold the keys to our YouTube account. Besides checking comments from time to time I haven't done much. (I've no talent whatsoever for videos, nor am I an acceptable speaker) If there were interest in it, I should be delighted to provide access to it.



What are player numbers on steam, does anyone speak with Hayden on a regular basis? How does it look on steam fora? I suppose steam is capable to draw a lot of players to it, and then it is the first place to talk about it.

An_dz

Quote from: sdog on March 24, 2017, 08:12:46 PM
An-dz was breathing some life into the then dormant facebook account. However, getting quality posts that engage users is quite a lot of work, and requires to follow progress very closely, and there needs to be something exciting to report. In particular on the graphics side. If more user engagement is desired, it cannot be placed only on his shoulders.
Yona-TYT also helps on Facebook, the last two messages are from him.

isidoro

Quote from: badwithnames14 on March 24, 2017, 04:26:57 AM
[...]and even with my on and off trying for more than a year I have found a way to confidently build a company up past a few lines before ending up bankrupt...
[...]

To find the key to economical success in the game, dear padawan, you should follow the statement of famous character Mr. Micawber in Charles Dickens' David Copperfield:
Quote
Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen [pounds] nineteen [shillings] and six [pence], result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery.

Or, to put it in other words: it doesn't matter how much money you have, but how much money you make and spend in a period of time.  In the player's information window you can find a lot of financial data.  In particular, one line labeled Margin.  If that is small, you should cut expenses, no matter how much money you have or you will end broke.

HaydenRead

Quote from: sdog on March 24, 2017, 08:12:46 PM
What are player numbers on steam, does anyone speak with Hayden on a regular basis? How does it look on steam fora? I suppose steam is capable to draw a lot of players to it, and then it is the first place to talk about it.
Steam Numbers are:
Installs: 93,198
At any given time there are generally between 10 and 40 players actually playing the game (this does not count players playing with Steam offline).
That is normally 1-2 Mac Users, 1-2 Linux users, and the rest Windows users.

I generally look in on these forums a couple of times a week...

jarocks

#23
Quote from: badwithnames14 on March 24, 2017, 04:26:57 AM
Well for one thing making people hunt to find the link to the forum probably isn't helping. The main download page could benefit from a button right at the top saying forum, which it currently lacks. http://www.simutrans.com/en/

Oh and hi, I'm new, honestly I barely know what I'm doing in this game. It's got quite the learning curve, and even with my on and off trying for more than a year I have found a way to confidently build a company up past a few lines before ending up bankrupt (Although I do have a good run going in the New York scenario, I'm a bit stuck on where to expand though). So yeah an ingame tutorial would be very useful, I doubt most people would put as much time and effort as I did before moving on. 

I'm honestly in awe at the people who manage to build up those massive cities, they must take so much time and effort.

You may want to try creating a map and toggling the freeplay option (which can be found in the players window and toggled at any time during the game) which disables the ability for a company to go bankrupt.

There is nothing wrong in wanting to build your ideal transit network free of fiscal constraints or using the public service player to create massive cities (or adjusting settings at the beginning to create them).

Create what you want, play around with various transit networks and see what works and what doesn't. Some of the maps you've seen are the result of countless hours of work, creating (and refactoring) expansive networks. There's a level of satisfaction you get from creating a large scale network in a map that you don't get with other games, which is why I constantly find myself coming back to Simutrans over the years.

Frank

#24
Simutrans is at the beginning very complex in the service for people who have not yet played in this direction.

And unfortunately the documentation in the wiki is restricted to only a few languages at the time. And these are usually very incomplete. In any case, not as up-to-date as it should be.

This also applies to InGame help. Which is in many languages very gaps and is very outdated.

I see the biggest problem, however, in the fact that the visibility of the font has become very difficult for many people with visual problems due to the much higher monitor resolutions.

And I think that by the high quality of the 3D render graphics (especially 128er size) many are deterred their graphics to publish. But also in many languages is missing in the documentation (developer part Wiki).

As for the monthly screenshot contest. On the one hand, the restriction to a forum is rather hindering as regards the number of participants (submissions, voting), which is why I had already shown a different possibility but which were rejected.

On the other hand, the monthly time pressure is generated. It is better to do this over a longer period of time (perhaps every six months). see Simutrans Player surveys

And most Linuxs bring Simutrans by now. These installations will not appear in any of our statistics.

LoSboccacc

just got back in the game after a looooooong period of not playing it, was lurking the forum to find why the map didn't show the lines to sources anymore and I noticed this topic....


stay strong devs! this game is great. may not appeal to the younger gen, but a coat of graphics isn't what's needed there. you can add graphics all you want, the game is just too slow at rewarding players and keeping them interested, unless in sandbox.

Roboron

Quote from: Frank on March 29, 2017, 08:26:49 AMAnd unfortunately the documentation in the wiki is restricted to only a few languages at the time. And these are usually very incomplete. In any case, not as up-to-date as it should be.

This also applies to InGame help. Which is in many languages very gaps and is very outdated.

I see the biggest problem, however, in the fact that the visibility of the font has become very difficult for many people with visual problems due to the much higher monitor resolutions.

I agree on this, specially the font problem. Come on, nowadays Full HD (1920x1080) monitors are very common, and when a (new) user open the game on one of those monitors and it's not able to read anything because it is just too small (and it's not necessary to have vision problems, just to be at a decent distance from the monitor)... Well, congratulations, you have lost a potential player.

Ters

I've been playing on Full HD for years, and the text in Simutrans is not small. In fact, it is about the same size as the text right here. (In fact, playing Simutrans on anything less seems cramped. There is hardly any room to have open windows and still see the world.) On a monitor that crams twice, or even four times, as many pixels into the same space, I can see that there will be problems.

Frank

Seeing is very individual and also dependent on the age.

And each monitor is slightly different. The fewest monitors should be set correctly.

And you must not forget, in the browser you can scale the font if it is too small. This does not happen in Simutrans.

Added to this is the contrast to the background. Black writing on wise background is better recognizable as black writing on gray or colored background.

And then comes the duration. A forum maybe read 30 minutes or less. Simutrans is played for several hours at a time.


font survey

Ters

Yes, but the text wasn't much larger, if not smaller, on my old 800x600 Super VGA monitor, nor is my eyesight supposed to have improved with age either, so HD or not doesn't say anything.

Roboron

The problem is, the text is always the same size, in pixels. But the size of pixels can be different in each monitor. If you have a 1280x720 monitor of the same size than a 1920x1080 monitor then the text must be smaller in the last one, because pixels are smaller. Of course, if your Full HD monitor is also larger enough you won't notice any difference. But that's not what usually happens. So the more smaller your pixels are, the more difficult is to read the font.

The font should be scalable, at least automatically given the resolution.

Ters

I have now done some calculations, and it might indeed be that the size of my monitors (and of those I know) have not quite grown proportionally to the number of pixels, although there is some uncertainty in how big the effective display area is compared to the stated size. However, that a screen is HD is in itself not a problem for text size. The issue is DPI. For post-HD monitors like Apple's Retina, the extra pixels seems to be all about high DPI rather than larger screens. But at that point, Simutrans has more problems than just the font size. It is a lot of pixels to render every frame in software. The only solution for now is to simply to render at lower resolution and scale everything up as a post-processing step.

Junna

The game does need better and more flexible font handling in general. What even is a bdf? It's very hard to read for me (admittedly I do need spectacles but I can't afford it), some more flexible font sizes and GUI options would be good-- the OpenGUI grf for OpenTTD is very pleasant.

prissi

Yes, this is high on the todo list and some work has been done. Unfortunately the freefont library is not really easy to search the available fonts on windows.

The13thRonin

I just started playing Simutrans, binging on it a lot (~40-50 hours in the last 2 weeks)