Current differences between OpenTTD and Simutrans

[YNM]

Maybe, its something that kinda hard... OpenTTD main objections is not about city building (as far as I know), so most patch like that never accepted to the official version. Also, patches should be examined for savegame compatibility and many other issues. (most not yet accepted patch has problem in that area)

[prissi]

Maybe a little later to answer.

Simutrans and OpenTTD has also very different local backgrounds. For instance simutrans has about 35% of its downloads from Japan and 12% from Brazil, while OpenTTD is much more popular in the english speaking countries. On a total scale OpenTTD is about 3-5 times larger (player, programmer, fame) than simutrans.

Another difference are the much larger variety of towns. pak128 has at the moment about 7000 houses, which are about a factor of ten more than I am aware of OpenTTD. (The original GFX of TT has 27 houses only.) Also Simutrans is much less centered on trains. For instance, pak128 has about 5x more road vehicles than train cars. All kind of vehicles can drive on diagonal ways too. You can run lots of ships too (there was an online game started in 1750 which had more than 8000 ships running on a large map.)

The third difference are the economic models. OpenTTD has inflation, interest and loans while the economy of simutrans is more stable, i.e. a line once started will run unsupervised as long as you like. It may become unprofitable over time (since revenue are much lower than in vanilla OpenTTD). Also infrastructure is more expensive and revenue is lower. In the end the gameplay feels much slower on simutrans (i.e. OpenTTD is more like checkers while Simutrans is chess )

The online gaming mode is there for quite some time in simutrans too. Also simutrans rarely crashes due to program errors. (The last crash is more than half a year ago, so I would say both programs are quite stable.) Thus I would not cause one more stable than the other.

(By the way, Debian incorporated simutrans years before OpenTTD, thus the Artistic Licence was free enough for Debian at least.)

[kamnet]

I can't seem to locate it now, but I remember somebody has either released or is working on a patch which lets you select specific buildings to place in towns when you're in the scenario editor.

[andythenorth]

Nobody has reported working on anything for OpenTTD to allow direct control of city building in a Sim City style (i.e. placing houses or zones etc).

OpenTTD development is not so much against a roadmap, and rather more 'who turns up with a good patch that works'. That said, some things are never accepted because they go against the project goals. I'm not sure that detailed city building is a project goal.

However:
- Game Scripts (GS) can include city growth as a gameplay goal. GS can control the rate of city growth.
- Town NewGRFs can control in detail town growth, building placement etc
- Players can place arbitrary NewObjects (from NewGRFs), but these can't accept / produce any cargo
- Players can fund a town
- Players can place towns in scenario editor

[kamnet]

Ha, I knew I wasn't crazy. Oberhümer's house placement patch.