Where to get it

Steam

1999 · Hansjörg Malthaner · Business simulation · City-building

Simutrans

Simutrans is an open-source transportation simulation game available for Windows, Mac, and Linux. Establish a successful transport company: Build road, rails, channels and more to get passengers, mail, and goods to their destinations.

Released: 6 March 1999
Platforms: BeOS Linux Windows macOS
Genres: Business simulation City-building Simulation Strategy
Developers: Hansjörg Malthaner Markus Pristovsek
Publishers: —
Modes: Multiplayer Single-player
Perspective: Bird view / Isometric
Themes: Business Sandbox
Country: Germany
Languages: Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Czech, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean and 7 more

About

Simutrans is a cross-platform simulation game in which the player strives to run a successful transport system by constructing and managing transportation systems for passengers, mail and goods by land (rail, road, tram, monorail, maglev), air (airplanes) and water (ship) between places. Like OpenTTD, Simutrans is an open-source transportation game based on the Transport Tycoon idea.

Players say

Media

The articlegameplay, story, development, reception

Development

Simutrans was originally written by Hansjörg Malthaner in 1997. Around 2004 he retired from development, and an international community of volunteers took over the development. Simutrans was developed internally as a closed source game until 2007, when the software was relicensed under the Artistic License 1.0.

Simutrans has been ported to Microsoft Windows, Linux, BeOS/Haiku, 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. Simutrans has multilingual support.

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 criticized, 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.

Another review from Amiga Future came to very similar conclusions (apart from the lack of sound support on Amiga OS). In particular the depth of simulation and the stability were highlighted.