We've already talked a bit about Simutrans ports to other programming languages (link (http://forum.simutrans.com/index.php?topic=3878.0)) and browsing along Sourceforge I've discovered this project called JaSit (http://sourceforge.net/projects/jasit/), managed by Florian Schlögl aka xenoplus. It seems to be a Java Transport Simulator, in other words a version of SimuTrans in Java.
There're no downloads available but the project started this year, just two months ago. I don't know if it's dead or not, but I thought it was important to give some publicity to the project, as many people asked and discussed about the technical details of such a port.
If you want more details, take a look at the project's roadmap (http://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/jasit/index.php?title=Developer:Roadmap_for_Version_1.0). Looks promissing, doesn't it?
Interesting! There's a user called "xenolupus" at the German Forum, too. I guess they're the same.
Looks interesting. We'll see in a few years, I guess...
They have a plan now, but I didn't see any code yet ...
http://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/jasit/index.php?title=Developer:Roadmap_for_Version_1.0
It seems they work with a heavy emphasis on planning and design. "Big Upfront Design" is not quite the favoured design approach anymore, more agile methods are the hype nowadays. But on the other hand, hobby projects are seldom planned this thoroughly, so I take this plan as a good sign for their project.
Freecol guys are big on planning... Otherwise I don't know any games that started with planning and succeeded. I heard PARPG went that route, but I also heard that that was a team of experienced authors...