Announcement of new extended fork for Jalápagos

[Ranran(retired)]

We are pleased to announce that we have started developing extended fork for our habitat Jalápagos.

As I mentioned two years ago, we had planned to create an extended fork for Jalápagos. This is because simutrans-extended is designed for the British culture, whereas Japan has a strange culture that differs from most of the rest of the world and is often derided as "Jalápagos". For example, the signaling system, the system of getting on a train standing up, and the way of thinking about cities are very different.
We decided to focus on it because of the growing demands and limited time within our community. It's finally time.  Think of it just like OPRP for standard. We hope we can show some deliverables next year. Hope to see you again next year when the cherry blossoms are in bloom.

(´・ω・｀)らんらん達はジ・インターナショナル・シミュトランスフォーラムを卒業(セルフ出荷)します！ 令和四年四月朔日

[prissi]

I think the first step would be rather upgrading one of the Japanese pak sets to support more extended features, before branching makes sense?

I am a little worried that with each fork fewer people contribute in the long term.

[Matthew]

Ranran, I saw that you were removing PR requests and wondered what you were planning. 

You have made many great contributions to Extended in recent years, especially the UI improvements and porting from Standard. Thank you for all that you have done for this project. And for the humour with which you have made your posts more interesting!

I wish you every success with your new fork and I hope that you keep the English-speaking players informed of your progress.

[Vladki]

Hello Ranran,

i'm really interested what are the fundamental differences between UK an Japan that cannot be satisfied on pakset level?
Maybe some of the changes would be useful for UK (or "western" countries in general).

[jamespetts]

This is interesting; I note the date of the post and wonder whether this might be an April Fools' Day joke.

Assuming that it is not, I do wonder whether there are indeed sufficient differences between UK and Japanese practice to require an entirely different fork. I should certainly be happy to incorporate features helpful for Japanese players/pakset authors into Extended so long as those features do not interfere with the fundamental aims of Extended. I am interested in what aspects of the ways of thinking about towns that you think may be different in Japan? I note that the planned towns growth algorithm changes have not yet been started in Extended.

Your work on Extended to date has been most excellent, and has greatly enhanced the quality of the code. I do hope that you will be able to continue to contribute to Extended, e.g. by backporting features/enhancements from the new version that will be compatible with Extended. Incidentally, apologies for not having had a chance to look at the recent work that you have done in the last month or so; I have been busy recently, and, realising that the next item of work had to be the piers system patch to ensure that this did not have further merge errors by being incompatible with later merges from standard, UI changes, etc., and that that would require a large amount of work, had not had a chance to look at that properly until to-day. After I we can confirm that the version with the piers system incorporated gets through a nightly build cycle without major problems, I can then look at incorporating your recent pull requests.

In any event, very best wishes for the project, and thank you again for your excellent work to date on Extended.

[Matthew]

If this is an April Fool's, I was totally taken in by this!       

But now you mention it, 5 minutes after midnight GMT on 1 April is very suspicious..... 

[Roboron]

Galapagos syndrome or Jalapagos (Japan + Galapagos) is what the Japanese call when they develop a product that evolves isolated from world markets. The term comes from the Galapagos Islands where Darwin studied plants and animals that were genetically isolated.

Interesting. Good luck with it