Simutrans

Simutrans is a cross-platform simulation game in which the player strives to run a successful transport system by transporting goods, passengers, and mail between places. Along with OpenTTD, Simutrans is an open source remake of Transport Tycoon. Simutrans was originally written by Hansjörg Malthaner but it is now maintained and developed by a small team which releases bug fixes, changes or new features for the game.

Simutrans is available free for Microsoft Windows, Linux, BeOS, Intel Mac OS X, iPhone and recently AmigaOS 4.x under the Artistic License which was adopted in 2007. Prior to that, Simutrans was a closed source game and developed internally. Simutrans also releases nightly builds for the program and its main PAKs.

Currently the stable release of Simutrans is version 102.2. There is an "experimental" release under development, which aims to extend the basic game.

Overview and features
The main goal of Simutrans is to provide an efficient transport system for passengers, goods, and mail to be transported to their desired destination fast and with minimal transfers, at the same time making the company grow and avoid bankruptcy.

Simutrans has a number of factory chains that are interconnected with other chains. For example, a coal mine produces coal for a coal power plant and an oil rig produces oil for a oil power plant. Supplying a factory with electric power will increase the production and allows for fine tuning the economy. Passengers and mail are transported between different cities and tourist attractions, and may use several methods of transport to find a route to their destination.

The Simutrans executable can run many different so-called PAK-sets. These PAKs determine the objects in the game, their appearance, and can modify payments and even the main menu. Gaming experience is therefore very dependent on the PAK-set.

Simutrans currently features 6 AI players, but unlike OpenTTD currently has no online capabilities. The terrain in Simutrans is freely-modifiable. It has a day and night cycle, different climates and seasons. In Simutrans, nearly all modes of transportation exist. At least buses/trucks, trains, and ships are always provided. If defined in the PAK-set aircrafts, monorails, or maglevs can be used too.

Simutrans is multilingual and is compiled for Windows, Linux, BeOS, Mac OS X and AmigaOS 4.x which make use of several graphics libraries such as GDI (Windows only), SDL (all versions) or Allegro (BeOS only). It is portable to any architecture using GCC and one of the aforementioned libraries.

Customising
The Simutrans executable must load a PAK-set which contains the game's objects. Over the years several PAK-sets have been created, an overview is given on the sourceforge page.

Simutrans can be easily expanded and modified. Simple modification can be done via editing the personal config file. Since the objects in the game just consist of a simple image and a short description file, it is very easy to create a house or add a train. Thus many contributed objects for all graphic sizes exist. The user can also add height maps and citylists which add city names into the game. Via the config file even deep modifications of the game mechanics are possible, like setting no stockpiling at factories.

Critical reception
GameDaily's Big Download considered Simutrans to be one of the best freeware games, highlighting the logical system of routing passengers and freight to their destinations, decent AI opponents, and the support for custom aesthetics or rules sets. However, the sometimes unreliable vehicle pathfinding was criticised, particularly with respect to alternate routes and switches for train lines. The sound effects were deemed to be unengaging, and new players may be baffled by the range of transportation possibilities.