磨难之间 SUFFERING: Reincarnation of Sins - SINNER X SINNER
Hello, everyone! Reset Version is now available!
Thank you for everyone who has been paying attention to SUFFERING-The Reincarnation of Sins. After a few minor updates since Early Access, the production team has embarked on a major revision and content optimization process. A year later, after a series of twists and turns, we finally realized the reset version of the early access .
During this period, we also went to Guangzhou to participate in an offline trial held by GAMFUNS (in May, when the epidemic was recovering). We were excited by the enthusiasm of the players and their suggestions helped the production team a lot. With the enhancement of guided teaching and the optimization of all aspects of detailed experience, in fact, our greatest wish is that this version of the update can make every player who enters SUFFERING can really GET the unique emotional experience of turn-based suffering games.
Reset Content Overview
Settings
No longer limits the number of times an unfortunate can awaken after death.
Added the Final Moment setting, each unfortunate who appears in the Room is cursed by the force of doom and bound to the "Final Moment" that belongs only to the unfortunate. Final Moment is the LIMIT of human life after falling into the Room of Suffering, each death and the awakening will make the Final Moment unceasingly diminishes, when the Final Moment returns to zero, the unfortunate soul will be swallowed up and lost forever.
Remove the opening setting of heart belief. After version reset, there is no need to select attribute preference in the opening. All four base attributes have 24 points.
Adjusted the amount of Sinsoul-Extra Attributes you get when you kill a sinner. The maximum you can get is 100.
Changed the Sinsoul-Extra Attributes remodeling rules so that there is no longer a limit on the number of points that can be allocated to a single attribute.
Remove the astrology divination setting, this is a difficult trade-off decisions, but the randomness of the astrology system has had a significant impact on every strategy of all bosses, miss out on important killing, bleeding or broken time, at the same time, the process of divination and settlement of astrological system longer each round's time, Seriously slowed down the pace of combat, and after much consideration, the team decided to remove the astrology system from this reset version.
Added story items that can be collected in story mode and used in battle to ease the difficulty of the game.
Added redemption for story items, giving players a way to redeem story items that can be used directly in battle.
Added a new scene called "the room of Asylum".
Added asylum related Settings to reflect that the unfortunate will encounter asylum seekers who know the rules of the world in the Room of Suffering.
Added new mythical creatures "SHI". Further embodies the world concept setting of SUFFERING.
UI [Non-Combat]
Reset the core UI components, including HP/DP/RP/Weapon/Ability/Item ICONS.
Reset the mode selection screen.
Reset the save files reset screen.
Reset the Statistics screen.
Removed floating window display character/equip information, redeveloped the Character Menu function.
Reset the weapon selection screen in the Room of Weapon.
Reset the ability selection screen in the Room of Ability.
Reset the item selection screen in the Room of Item.
Reset the Specter merge screen in the Room of Summon.
Reset the Remould screen in the Room of Baptize.
Reset dialog system and dialog screen,add dialog character drawing.
Reset the transfer selection screen and interactive branch selection screen.
Reset the bookshelf screen and book reading screen in the Room of Wistom.
UI [Combat]
Reset core combat UI components and layout adjustments.
Added textual interpretation support for individual instruction UI.
Increased the proportion of Rage Points displayed on both sides.
Added a quick switch for automatic QTE in the combat UI.
Added enemy command view screen, you can view the used enemy command at any time in the battle. Added the function to view enemy action commands in the combat UI.
Improved character information display on both sides, showing key information such as power charge level.
Added an item screen to the story, allowing you to use such items in battle. Added a shortcut icon to use story items in the combat UI.
Added the battle record screen , allowing you to view action records at any time during the battle. Added a shortcut icon to view the battle record in the combat UI.
Reset the Sinsoul selection screen, optimize the Sinsoul icon and Sinsoul information display.
Reset the Specter selection screen, optimize the Specter icon and Specter information display.
Added the command selection screen after summoning Specter, including Specter special skill release and Specter recall function.
Redesign the kill effect and victory screen
Improved unlock display of Sinsoul/Weapon/Abilities/Items
Redesign the death effect and defeat screen
Added the Action Record view function in the Defeat option screen
Function
New "Mode Selection" screen, after version reset, in addition to Story mode and Death mode, Challenge mode has also been opened by default.
New "Reset Data" screen, after the version reset, you can choose the specific mode to reset archive files, rather than reset the entire archive files of the current reincarnation.
After the version reset, the new "Statistics" screen can visually display statistics including the number of kill rounds.
Difficulty adjustment. After the version reset, the difficulty curves for "New Trial" and "Face the Sin" in Story mode have been significantly adjusted.
Complete all the rules of Death mode, after the version reset, Death mode will be one of the initial open modes.
New/level based "Challenge mode" was added. After the version reset, Challenge mode will be one of the initial open modes.
In story mode, added "story items" that can be used in battle, which can be used to ease the difficulty of completing the game.
In story mode, combine the story setting with a teaching battle, which is mainly to help the player quickly familiarize with the core rules.
Added the complete statistics option after completing the game, the completer can decide whether to join the complete list [Steam nicknames only].
Added a new book in the Room of Wistom · The legendary deeds of the past, which shows players around the world who have cleared the game.
Added the enemy command view function to the battle screen, now players can see the command information used by the enemy.
Added automatic QTE shortcut in the battle screen, now players can switch QTE trigger mode at any time.
Contents
Added a CG video of the story after killing each Sinners -- "Sinner's Past"
Story CG video added to the Hidden Chapter storyline "The Soul Researcher" - “A Soul Nowhere to Go”
Added crowdfunding unlock BOSS· Specter hunter, unique mechanic for Turn skip , after collecting all the specters can challenge
In Challenge mode, the first seven challenge levels are now available, allowing players to challenge more versions of the powerful Sinner
Adjust the difficulty design, and with the Easy difficulty, the overall experience will be more friendly to new RPG players
Adjust the difficulty design to increase the acceptance of the difficulty curve between different bosses in Normal difficulty
Adjust the intensity, passive design, behavioral logic and strategy combination of each Sinner
Adjust the OVERALL strength of the third and fourth Specter to reduce the difficulty of obtaining these two powerful Specters
Adjust t several rules for Specter capture to make it easier for players to get it quickly
Adjusted the combat UI for Specter Summoning and Specter special skill, and added a new Specter special skill screen
Added the Specter [recall] function in the battle , so that the whole Specter system is used more flexible
Add a new special skill to the fourth Specter to help open up new ways of strategy
Enhance the spell in the ability, so that the damage and impact of the spell are increased
Improved the wind spell in the Four Elephants spell. Optimized the combination of fire and wind spells
Enhanced the ablity Thunder Endow, after used, in addition to reducing damage, it also reduces the break impact
Enhanced the ablity Iron Wall ,now reduces damage as well as damage damage
Enhanced the ablity Wild Drop,the resulting defense suspend now lasts two turns
Strengthen a number of Marial Arts instructions, the differentiation of Marial Arts instructions reflect their own characteristics
Adjust the order and performance of some items so that they can be used in different strategy
Adjust the performance of several weapon skills, such as the hit of weapon Lance, the weapon Cudget trigger the Bonesnap
Adjust the behavior in Dark state. Now Attack items and Revolver Shot commands can now be used in the Dark state
Improve the instructions for Revolver Shot , and guide players to try Multiple Shot from the instructions
Optimize visual art, special effects design of some commands and Sinsouls and specter skill
Improved the presentation and UI design of the Statistics to make it easier to visualize the player's killing record
Optimized story atmosphere in the SUFFERING after killing all sinners
Achievement
Add a new achievement [Soul Hunter's Challenge], which can be achieved by killing the BOSS unlock in Crowdfunding
Add a new achievement [Cut off the past], complete the challenge level in Challenge Mode - Losing the past doesn't mean losing everything...
Add a new achievement [The agony of starvation], complete the challenge level in Challenge Mode - The only thing I can't stop is eating...
Add a new achievement [Sinister under the shadows], complete the challenge level in Challenge Mode - A deadly crisis lurking beneath your feet...
Add a new achievement [The horrible death melody], complete the challenge level in Challenge Mode - The terrible flood with the melody of death...
Add a new achievement [Just to plunder everything], complete the challenge level in Challenge Mode - Maybe...Is the true scythe of plunder...
Add a new achievement [The fury killing], complete the challenge level in Challenge Mode - A raging heart burned in malice...
Add a new achievement [Invincible strong], complete the challenge level in Challenge Mode - Serious strong and scary strength...
The condition of achievement [Defeat WuZang Quickly] has been changed. Defeat WuZang in18 rounds on Nomal Difficulty
The condition of achievement [Defeat Lardy Quickly] has been changed. Defeat Lardy in16 rounds on Nomal Difficulty
The condition of achievement [Defeat Venn Quickly] has been changed. Defeat Lardy in 20 rounds on Nomal Difficulty
The condition of achievement [Defeat Sudy Quickly] has been changed. Defeat Sudy in 15 rounds on Nomal Difficulty
The condition of achievement [Defeat Orr Greed Quickly] has been changed. Defeat Orr Greed in 12 rounds on Nomal Difficulty
The condition of achievement [Defeat Boulos Quickly] has been changed. Defeat Boulos in 20 rounds on Nomal Difficulty
The condition of achievement [Defeat Wright Quickly] has been changed. Defeat Wright in 15 rounds on Nomal Difficulty
The condition of achievement [Burn The Wind!] has been changed. Complete the story mode of the first Reincarnation in 2 hours
Save
After this version reset, the version number of SUFFERING-The Reincarnation of Sins will be reset to [EA.1.0.0] during Early Access.
After the version reset, the archive files will adopt the new naming mechanism, and the old archive files will be retained, but no longer read.
Achievements that have already been achieved are still valid after version reset, and new achievements can also be unlocked through normal play.
It's encouraging that in the 2022 ChinaJoy X Game Connection Indie Game Development Awards, we were nominated for seven awards, including GAME OF THE YEAR, BEST CHINESE GAME, BEST HARDCORE GAME, Best PC GAME, and BEST VISUAL ART AND DESIGN. This is the first time we've been recognized outside of our core players. We are very exciting. When we finally learned that SUFFERING was the BEST CHINESE GAME, we were all struck dumb with amazement...
We still want to polish the details and expand the content as much as possible during the entire early access period, and we also want to make SUFFERING an indie game worth playing indeed. The production team will continue to work hard for this, and thank you very much for supporting us all the time! We hope you can give us more feedback. Your real feedback is the biggest help for us to continuously improve the game and make the game experience better!
「The Second Reincarnation」and Official Version
The PC official version of SUFFERING , which includes the Second Reincarnation, is also in development, and the team will release more Setting modes and BOSS features for the Second Reincarnation. The PC version is expected to be available on steam in 2023.
After a break we are back with a big patch for the app. - Updated the engine, which means we have released a patch for all our scenes. - Changed the way the token placement works, its now possible to place the token entirely in the 3d camera mode, not only in map mode. Grid snapping is removed. - A new token import feature which allows for importing your own model files (fbx, obj, stl, glb) - Added new built in tokens - Streamlined the dice rolling UI - Bugfixes and quality of life improvements
Welcome to the last of interviews of the Simutrans Anniversary before the final event! Our special guest today has the honour of being the only other successful developer who has made a Simutrans fork: Simutrans OTRP. Let's explore the boundaries of Simutrans with the help of his creator, Himeshi!
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First of all, introduce yourself. Who are you? Where do you live? What did you study? Where are you working or have worked on the past?
I am Himeshi. Himeshi is a handle which I use in the Japanese community. THLeaderH is my handle on the International Simutrans Forum and other international simutrans communities. I have lived in Tokyo for my whole life except for its very beginning.
I am a software engineer at a Japanese IT company, which provides a chat app for smartphones. My job is developing the company's chat app for iOS with Swift programming language, and the chat app is widely used in Japan and some east Asian countries. I am in the second year of my career since I graduated from the school in March of last year.
I studied computer science and electrical engineering in the University of Tokyo, and its graduate school. I have a master's degree, but do not have a doctor's degree. I enjoyed studying in the university, but was not so good at research. I studied electrical tactile display during my master's period, but it ended with submitting only a few papers to small conferences without paper review, and did not participate in any on-site academic meeting since the COVID era started during my master course.
When not programming in your daily job or in Simutrans, what do you like to do?
Aside from development, I love playing Simutrans. I usually play my local map with OTRP, and sometimes play a network game with my friends in the Japanese Simutrans community. Chatting and voice calling on Discord is my daily habit. There are a bunch of discord servers which are derived from the Japanese Simutrans community, and I am in multiple of them. The relationship is a kind of friendship, rather than the simutrans community members, and we talk about so many kinds of topics there.
Although the frequency has decreased recently due to COVID, I often go to the home party in the house of one of the core community members. I don't remember how many times I went there. At least, so many times since a few years ago. We spend a precious time there with beers and Japanese Sake. The house owner (We call him "Kumi-cho") could not drink alcohol at first, but recently, he started enjoying the Sake we brought with us.
And recently I bought a new Toyota car with a manual gearbox, so I frequently go driving in my holidays. The driving is often with my family and the friends in the Simutrans community.
Indeed, the Japanese Simutrans community seems very united, and it is without doubt the largest and most active community. Which is surprising, since traditionally the largest community has been the German one (being the early developers from Germany). Why do you think the Japanese community has become the most active?
It is a tough question. Personally, I think the offline meeting culture and Japanese characteristics to prefer crafting are the factors of Japanese simutrans community prosperity. However, it is only one aspect of the community. To understand how the community became as today, I have to summarize the history of the Japanese simutrans community.
Fortunately, three years ago, Peruri summarized the community history in our meeting. The history described below is based on this video.
The Japanese Simutrans community is said that it started on the anonymous board, called "2ch". It started with the translation project to Japanese, then the members started to post addons, their saved map, and screenshots. Since 2ch is anonymous, most of the members did not have their handle at that time.
After that, the Japanese simutrans wiki was founded, and addons were posted there. Uploading simutrans videos to "niconico", a Japanese video sharing service, became popular at that time. With these activities, creators had handles in the community.
Simutrans 111.0 supported the network game. As soon as it was released, Japanese simutransers started to play the network game. Addon authors were also in the network game, which means players and addon authors play the game in the same place. At that time, twitter was becoming popular, and twitter became the main place for the Japanese community. On twitter, players also have their handles. Since the conversations on twitter are public, more and more people joined the Japanese simutrans community.
As the community prospers, some people started to meet face to face. They understood how great meeting face to face is, and the number of face to face meetings gradually increased. As a result, in the Japanese simutrans community, a bunch of smaller and closer communities which are based on face to face meetings were formed. Some members regularly held drinking parties in these communities. Moreover, meeting face to face encouraged starting the larger projects, such as SIS and pak256.
As the information exchanged in the communities increased in amount and became more private, twitter became not suitable for communities. So many communities moved to Discord, and they became closed communities. Since a few years ago, Discord has worked as comfortable and safe places for communities.
On the other hand, Japanese simutrans communities are not an exception for the recent world wide simutrans community shrink. As most communities work on Discord, fewer newcomers are coming to the communities. At the same time, some existing members reduce the time to spend in the community, and often disappear from the community. Also, we talk about things other than Simutrans more frequently.
One of those meetings is the Japanese Simutrans Conference. Could you tell us more about it? What kind of activities are done? When did it start and by who?
The Japanese Simutrans Conference started in 2017. At that time, the community members explored how to make addons and their play styles individually, and the knowledge was not shared enough. So, on twitter, I suggested holding a simutrans conference. The events themselves had been operated by other community members. The first one was held by JHSDF.
In the simutrans conferences, the attendees presented Simutrans related knowledge and experiences with slides. The simutrans conferences were held three times in 2017, and once a year since 2018. This year, I called for presentations for the simutrans conferences as we did last year, but no one applied for it. So I decided not to hold the conference this year. The Simutrans knowledge and experiences have been shared enough via the past simutrans conferences, and I think the Japanese Simutrans Conference served its purpose.
When did you join the community?
I joined the community ten years ago. At that time, the series "The story of Kumagaya peninsula development", which is still a monumental Simutrans video series for these days, was being uploaded. I was affected, and also uploaded my Simutrans video series. Seven years ago, I joined a face to face meeting for the first time, which was in a chartered train. And five years ago, I started modifying the simutrans code, and my contribution for the International Simutrans Forum.
Video from the Kumagaya series by 128Na
The Simutrans version you started working on at that time is what we know today as Simutrans OTRP (One-Way Two-Lane Road Patch). What did motivate you to start working on this project?
At the end of 2016, I was developing Route map maker, which is a software for PCs to make a railway route map easily. It was a success to some extent, and I was looking for the next thing to develop. Route map maker was written from scratch, and I wanted to develop a new feature for an already existing larger software as the next step. Simutrans was the best for that purpose. At that time I had already played simutrans for five years, and I had wanted to try to add new features to it. So I decided to try modifying simutrans and adding a new feature for it.
There were so many candidate features to be developed, but I thought that it was easy to improve the road vehicle overtaking logic for one-way highway, which was revealed to be completely false. I knew that some conditions which seem to be too strict were imposed on overtaking, and I thought the overtaking improvement can be completed just by removing these conditions. The result was, the collision of the two vehicles on the overtaking lane. Then, my long journey of OTRP started.
At what point of development did you announce that you were working on your own version of Simutrans?
As soon as I succeeded to relax the conditions of overtaking, I posted the demo video on YouTube . This video showed overtaking under slope, dense traffic, and intersections. At this point, there were so many side effects to be solved. Two months later, I posted a message on the International Simutrans Forum. Like Simutrans-Extended, at first, OTRP was intended to be merged into Simutrans Standard, so I submitted the patch files. The overtaking logic of Simutrans Standard was already very complicated. And as a result of adding so much logic to deal with the side effects by the relaxed overtaking conditions, the code of overtaking logic got more and more complicated, and I knew that the patch was very hard to merge into the simutrans nightly. I wanted to discuss how to solve this situation, but unfortunately, the overtaking logic complexity has not been solved and it is still a large technical debt of OTRP.
At the same time of posting a patch to the forum, I posted the executable binaries to test with. For the Japanese community, I mainly announced about these executable binaries, and eventually, they started to test and play with the OTRP binaries.
Demo video of Simutrans OTRP
What are other features that differentiate OTRP from Simutrans Standard?
There are four features which largely differentiate OTRP from Simutrans Standard. The first one is the improved road vehicle overtaking and other road related configurations, which is the original feature of OTRP.
The second one is the area construction tools which are suitable for large scale development. With the removal tool, you can select the area where you want to remove the object by dragging the area. The city building construction tool of OTRP enables you to select multiple kinds of city buildings, and distribute the selected buildings randomly in the selected area. The slope making tool also supports area selection. These area construction tools are useful especially on a network game. I should note that now these area construction tools can be implemented as squirrel scripted tools, and modifying the C++ code is not necessary.
The third one is convoy coupling. Convoy coupling can be a powerful tool to accommodate so many routes on a single track. OTRP realizes the convoy coupling feature with the two simple options in the schedule, "try coupling" and "wait for coupling".
The last one is time scheduling.Before this feature was implemented, players had used the "maximum waiting time" feature to make trains depart at the regular interval. However, the waiting time was not so flexible (only 1/(2^n) month) and this approach was quite fragile because a single delay of arrival caused the delay of all successors. OTRP has the time scheduling feature which is similar to that of simutrans-Extended, but has some additional parameters like "no load" and "load immediately before the departure" options. These options are useful to control the passenger flow by optimizing the route costs.
Recently, Simutrans' Lead Developer prissi stated in a previous interview that he would like to see the overtaking code ported back to Standard "now that it does not desync any more and seems stable". Would you still like to see your code merged or are you afraid that this could make OTRP players lose interest in Simutrans OTRP after so many years of work?
Bringing the OTRP features to Standard is welcome. According to the survey conducted by Peruri, who talked about the Japanese simutrans community history in the conference, about 70% of Japanese players still use OTRP. Since OTRP stopped merging the nightly commits for some reasons, the fruits of simutrans standard development are not delivered to OTRP players. OTRP was derived from Simutrans Standard, and I hope Japanese players go back to the Standard version and enjoy the latest achievements of Simutrans Standard development.
There were some forks of Simutrans which implemented novel features. As far as I know, Experimental (now Extended), Iron Way, and Tiny Timetable Patch (ttt) are listed as larger ones. Especially, ttt, which was developed 10 years ago, had much more features than OTRP around time scheduling. However, except for Simutrans Extended which is actively maintained and developed by James, all these forks are not maintained and already obsolete, which means that the features of these forks were lost for most of the Simutrans players. Seeing the "loss" of the time scheduling feature of ttt, I wanted to avoid making OTRP one of these obsolete forks. But unfortunately, it is becoming one of them. I believe that most OTRP players will go back to Simutrans Standard in the future, although it may take a long time. Porting the overtaking code of OTRP to Simutrans Standard prevents the loss of overtaking feature, which should be a huge benefit for players.
I am for porting the overtaking logic to Simutrans Standard, but I think the code itself should not be ported. The overtaking code in OTRP contains so much ad-hoc logic to deal with the relaxed overtaking conditions. No one, including me, knows why the current OTRP overtaking code looks to work fine. The overtaking logic should be fully reimplemented when we port it to Simutrans Standard so that everyone can maintain it. At least, the complicated logic should be encapsulated. And, I regret to say that I have no plan to join this porting project for now. Compared to the time when I brought this to Simutrans Extended, I lost some of my motivations to contribute to the Simutrans codebase.
Screenshot showing Tiny Timetable Patch
What are the reasons behind your lack of motivation? Is this lack of motivation behind OTRP lack of development too?
To answer this question, I have to figure out what was my motivations for Simutrans development. I think there were four motivations for me.
The first one was simply realizing features I wanted. I wanted to make road vehicles overtake others more efficiently on a highway, and make convoys being coupled to simulate the railway operation in the real world. A smooth overtaking of trains was also what I wanted to play in my local and network games.
The second was realizing features everyone wanted. At the time when I started the OTRP development, road vehicle overtaking, railway convoy coupling, and time scheduling were the three largest features which so many Japanese Simutrans players had been dreamed. Also, keeping the base nightly revision up to date was an important thing, because OTRP players can enjoy the fruits of the latest Simutrans nightly development.
The third was learning how to modify an existing large software. Simutrans was the largest code base I had ever seen at that time, and the development of OTRP was a valuable opportunity to learn how to find the code I wanted to modify, how to modify while minimizing the bug, and how to deal with the players feedback. In this aspect, the OTRP development experience became the fundament of my carrier as a software engineer.
The last one was contributing to the Simutrans community. As a player who has been loved Simutrans for more than ten years, contributing to Simutrans is just fun.
Unfortunately, as OTRP matured, three of them seems to have been lost. Firstly, in the end of 2020, I almost completed the implementation of the time scheduling feature, and the three features which I and the Japanese community had been dreamed, road vehicle overtaking, railway convoy coupling, and time scheduling, were achieved. Now I have nothing new which I strongly want to realize. Other Japanese Simutrans players also seem to be basically satisfied with the current OTRP, although I still receive some minor requests.
Secondly, keeping the base nightly revision up to date became almost impossible. About two years ago, I remember that there was a big change on Simutrans nightly in the schedule settings UI. At that time, the schedule settings UI of OTRP was highly optimized for OTRP features. I made a prototype of the schedule settings UI based on the new one of the nightly, but it was very unpopular from the Japanese OTRP players at that time, and I had to give up following that change of the Simutrans nightly. I tried to merge other nightly commits at first, but it became soon very hard since there were so many dependencies to the schedule settings UI change.
Lastly, as I spent so much time in OTRP development, what I learn from OTRP development was decreasing. This is generally inevitable when you work in the same product for a long time. As I learned programming in other fields such as the research and my job, using modern languages such as Swift and Kotlin was much more fun. And, I gradually felt tired to work with the very old fashioned C++ code and deal with the bugs which are never seen with the modern languages.
For now, contributing to the community can be the only motivation of coding in Simutrans. To be honest, since I started my full time job, I am as busy as I was a graduate school student. However, my Simutrans development time was replaced with learning modern programming language features which I may use in my job, and other hobbies like driving a car.
Is there any feature you considered (or that was proposed to you) for OTRP but was discarded for technical or other reasons?
The road intersection feature. As in the real world of left sided driving, turning right causes the crossing over the opposite lane, and it may cause a traffic jam. The right turn lane feature and the right turn traffic light feature were considered, but both needed to handle multiple tiles as a single intersection object, and it was technically difficult. When I considered the intersection feature, I was playing Cities Skylines with the famous mod TM:PE, which gives so much control on road traffic. And I thought you could play Cities Skylines if you wanted much more control on the road traffic. Since simutrans is a tile based game, this level of road traffic control is too much for simutrans, I think.
Have you received any help from other contributors in Simutrans OTRP?
In code, the area construction tools were contributed by Shingoushori.
And, some people helped me to develop OTRP in other ways. Ahakuoku helped me a lot by doing so many tasks other than coding such as release announcement, response for inquiries, and bug investigation. 128Na opened the site "OTRP updates" which summarizes the OTRP releases. I often refer to this web site to check in which version a feature was implemented. And, so many Japanese community members helped me in the bug investigation in the early phase. Road vehicle overtaking, convoy coupling, and time scheduling are the features which received most bug reports.
The site OTRP updates is a living changelong of Simutrans OTRP.
We have discussed in previous interviews the apparent decline in Simutrans playerbase in the last decade. Simutrans OTRP collects statistics about usage, and that can help us understand this tendency. What does the OTRP data say about it?
The OTRP usage statistics says nothing about simutrans player base decline. The simutrans player base decline is a phenomenon over 10 years, and OTRP started collecting usage in 2020, only two years ago.
The OTRP usage statistics tells us about the number of active players, the share of OTRP versions, and the pak set share among the OTRP players. Although I have not analyzed the usage of this year, in 2021, the number of daily active players was constantly over 80, and over 100 on holidays. Older versions of OTRP are still used because sometimes a specific OTRP version has a problem with loading a player generated pakset. Some popular network games in the Japanese Simutrans community still use an older OTRP, such as v29_6.
According to the usage statistics, OTRP players prefer pak128 as much as pak128.japan. pak.nippon is slightly less popular than those two popular paksets, and the share of pak64 was about a half of that of pak.nippon in 2021.
I think Steam will be the main distribution route of Simutrans, due to the recent trend of relying on platforms and thanks to the effort of the simutrans nightly development. The Japanese community has contributed to Simutrans mainly with addons, but most Japanese addons are not in the Simutrans official distribution. Since Steam is becoming a popular distribution route, I think we should consider how to deliver Japanese addons to the players from Steam. It's kind of a political issue rather than a technical issue.
What is your preferred play-style?
I usually play simutrans as a transport simulator, rather than a diorama. Basically I let cities grow as the game engine does. The hand construction of city buildings is only for the extension of the city limit. Since OTRP became stable, I also prefer "car only" play. Since the capacity of road vehicles is much smaller than that of trains, it is very challenging to transport all passengers with road vehicles. Roads are always crowded, and large bus terminals suffer from grid locks.
Three years ago, we built a very large scale highway network in the network game. The highway has 10-lanes width at the widest point, which cannot be seen in Japan. Also, junctions are highly complicated.
Video showing the large scale highway network
Is there someone from the Simutranc community you admire?
In the international community, I especially admire Leartin. He gave me deep insights and showed proper ways when I was stuck in difficult problems. The convoy coupling feature is one of the most difficult problems for me and I did the implementation of it three times. Leartin proposed to me an uncomplicated and effective solution for this and the current architecture is based on Leartin's proposal.
In the Japanese community, I admire 128Na. I cannot list all of his contributions, but he made the simutrans video series which are the most famous in Japan. He now builds and operates “Simutrans addon portal”, a website where a lot of Japanese addons have been posted recently.
What is your favourite pakset?
I love pak128, with a bunch of Japanese addons. I like this pakset because it has a high resolution and so many published addons with realistic painting.
Thank you so much for the interview! Is there anything more you would like to say to Simutrans players?
I hope the international community and the Japanese community interact more. There used to be a language barrier between the international community and the Japanese community, but now we can overcome it with an effective translation service. One of the reasons why OTRP was born was that the Japanese community could rarely bring the ideas which were discussed in the Japanese community to the international forum at that time. I hope more feature requests from the Japanese community are discussed with the international development team, and a bunch of Japanese addons contribute to simutrans players all over the world, not only for Japanese. Fortunately, the international community and the Japanese community are interacting in some Discord servers these days.
And, I want to say thank you to Simutrans. Simutrans made me join this wonderful Japanese simutrans community, which is now one of my essential communities. Simutrans gave me a chance to make changes in the code. The OTRP development experience is now the foundation of my career as a software engineer. And above all, Simutrans gave me so much time of joy.
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Schedule of the Simutrans 25th Anniversary Posts
That's all for the anniversary! Goodbye!
What? What do you say about a SUPER SECRET BIG FINAL EVENT? Ah yes, I nearly forget about the greatest Simutrans event ever made where everyone can participate! Do you want to know what it is...?
Added - Save points during surface-to-orbit missions Added - Save points during orbit-to-surface missions Fixed - Missing ship Calum Ex-5 at GreenHouse orbital station
