Is Simutrans Standard finished?

[Qayyum]

Is Simutrans Standard finished?By finished, I mean, having the interface and world logic finished.I would like to question that because I fear that any changes to Simutrans Standard would break Simutrans Extended. IF Simutrans Standard has to nufge once more: Simutrans Extended would have to be re-develop

[Ters]

It is finished like a building is finished. At some point, there will be an urge to redecorate, or "add an extra room". Such things have happened several times since a desire for some renovations caused Experimental to come into being.

[prissi]

Simutrans standard is not finished, but the focus has shifted to extended. Both are different enough, like to almost too complex signalling system of extended, or the tutorial scripting of standard (or the region game option) and more.

Also patches tend to go into standard only if they do not break anything, which requires rather extensive testing. So almost any nightly is playable and very stable. Standard would also allow for much larger network games (if you have such a server), and is not geared much towards a certain pak, unlike experimetnal, which is tightly knit to pak128.britain.

[Leartin]

I like the building example, though I wouldn't say "it's finished, now we can redecorate or renovate"

- It's a raw building in the first place. Wallpapers and furniture are a matter of paksets, not the game.
- People moved in as soon as the first room was done, before even heating and electricity.
- There is no plan on what the finished building would look like, so nobody can say whether it's done or not.
- Some rooms are moldy due to lack of planning, as the windows for airing were removed in later building stages.

- An inhabitant turned it into a smart home. Works fine, but since some of the other inhabitants don't care about it they keep buying incompatible lightbulbs. If some larger work was done with the central heating unit in the basement, one can expect that the smart-home-guy will freeze the next winter.

[RESTRICTED ACCOUNT]

As far as I know, there are few extended players in Japan and most of the Simutrans players play standard.
There are many pakset and Japanese add-ons. 
They tend to like Japanese vehicles and world view because Japanese vehicles and world view are unique.

[prissi]

Given that experimental is more or less driven by British guys, playing British pakset, I ma not sure that this is special to the Japanese mindeset. I would say that this was rather a historical "accident". Simutrans was the first freely (and long lived enough, unlike freetrain) modding transport game which featured Japanese vehicles.

[jamespetts]

It is not compulsory to merge changes from Standard to Extended, although it is desirable in many cases, so any features that change in Standard do not necessarily have to change in Extended. Phystam, however, is working on a large project to bring Extended up to date with Standard, albeit omitting some of the features that have not been well developed in Extended, such as the scripting language.

That Pak128.Britain is closely associated with Simutrans-Extended is largely an historical accident; the Standard version of the pakset was being developed at about the same time as I started work on Extended (then "Simutrans-Experimental"). Initially, I did not do any pakset work at all, but, since I had added a number of pakset dependent features, I could not test them without modifying a pakset to work with them.

I preferred the larger graphics of Pak128, but that was not open source at the time, but the emerging British pakset (originally an addon for Pak128) did become open source; as I am from the UK myself, this pakset was of interest to me, so I ended up forking this and adding Simutrans-Extended features to it. As Simutrans-Extended grew, so did the pakset, and, by developing both side by side, I have been able to balance the pakset to match the features and design the features according to the needs of the pakset.

There were initially some other Simutrans-Extended ("Experimental") compatible paksets, but the early ones did not last very long, perhaps because the branch was less stable in the early days.

However, in recent years, a second generation of Simutrans-Extended paksets has emerged, Pak128.Sweden-Ex, Pak128.Cz-Ex and the latest and perhaps the most heavily developed, Pak.256. The latter is certainly of interest, as, being Japanese in origin, it focusses on the part of the world where Simutrans is most popular (Japan is the only country in the world where Google searches for "Simutrans" are more numerous than those for "Openttd").

I should very much like to see the continued development of other paksets, such as Pak.256 or Pak128.Sweden-Ex, to be compatible with Simutrans-Extended: the more people who are able to enjoy Simutrans-Extended, the more people who will be interested in helping to make it better, and the better that it will become, enabling even more to enjoy it; that virtuous circle appears to have gained momentum in the last few years, and long may it continue.

I do look forward to the day when there is a large server game in Pak.256 with many regular players - that would be quite a splendid thing to see, I think.