I think this is incredible, and I am so happy for him, he deserves all the praise he gets (and maybe more).
I will sin and make this about me, briefly, but just to say that when I was a kid/teenager with a really slow computer, a) I enjoyed coding much more, b) I think I was a way better programmer. Constraints make you better, you have to be smarter. I miss those times.
Well, nothing is easier then adding constraints. Removing them is what's difficult - so why don't you add them back if it makes you a better programmer and you enjoy doing it more?
Personally, I think the reason you enjoyed it more as a teenager is just down to the fact you were fully in control of what to do and had no external pressure to earn money etc, so if anything you had less constraints - at least from my point of view
> Well, nothing is easier then adding constraints.
Which is why dieting and quitting smoking are famously easy things to do! ;)
There's something to be said for the "scrappyness" of resource limitations inflicted upon you when solving some problem. A sense of Triumph against the Universe itself is a nice pay-off
Which is often the case in music too actually. So many famous artists and bands created their best work early in their careers. You would think touring and several albums make them perfect the craft of making songs, but I think involving money and external pressure actually kill the creative spark if you’re not mindful about it.
Those early albums often consist of material that was basically battle-hardened by the time it reached the studio. Bands early in their career often spend lots of time all in the same room, writing songs together then do lots of playing for small crowds, where they get a very up close feel for the audience response. Material that doesn’t go over well with band mates and audiences gets dropped.
With the industry’s album release cycle, bands are often under time pressure to cut a new album, so they end up writing in the studio, each person laying down tracks individually, and missing out on all the feedback of earlier iterations.
Simple and easy are often conflated a bit, but measured by outcomes, are quite different. Comments offerring humorous parallels of common simple and easy conflations will follow.
What's easier is removing the constraints you just added artificially. Constraints you can remove with a flick of a finger are not constraints.
> so why don't you add them back
The reason the proverb says "necessity is the mother of invention" is because "desire" is usually not enough to drive it. It's easy to take the hard road when you're forced onto it, but very hard to choose it when there's an easy alternative.
> Constraints you can remove with a flick of a finger are not constraints.
Why not? Who cares how/why they're there, as long as you follow the constraints, regardless of how easy they are to remove, they're still there.
I frequently use this when stuck creatively in music production. "Ok, now I can only use this filter for any sound shaping", or "Make a song using only instruments outputting mono", or "Maximum 10 cables to make a new sound on the modular synth" or whatever. Really easy for me to skip these artificial constraints at any time, they still help a lot.
The people who face them. The constraints are making the goal harder to reach. The goal is on the other side of the constraints and it takes power of will to refuse to remove them and keep pushing. This forces a different, slower, more difficult to reach solution.
> when stuck creatively in music production
So you're not introducing constraints, you're creatively trying out things to fix your problem. They're not a wall preventing you from reaching your goal, they're the bridge. Your constraint is the temporary lack of creativity, and what you introduce is the means to reach the solution faster.
> Really easy for me to skip these artificial constraints at any time, they still help a lot.
When you remove these you're stuck in a creativity block and failed to achieve your goal. When you remove actual constraints you make the goal easier to reach. It's a matter of perspective and what you want to achieve. You wouldn't want a long road through the mountains as your daily commute but it's probably lovely as a hike.
The only way to make the problems comparable is to set a programming goal of "write the most efficient code to do X" but for real work the goal is almost always "do X".
> So you're not introducing constraints, you're creatively trying out things to fix your problem. They're not a wall preventing you from reaching your goal, they're the bridge. Your constraint is the temporary lack of creativity, and what you introduce is the creative solution.
I feel like we're talking past each other. Adding these sort of requirements in order to "fix the problem", is typically what people are referring to as "adding artificial constraints to foster creativity".
The goal is making a song, anything that restricts you on how you are allowed to do this, is a constraint, as far as I understand the word "constraint" at least.
> When you remove actual constraints you make the goal easier to reach.
Yes, this is why the previous examples are constraints, not "bridges". Without them it's easier, with them it's harder.
I think you're missing the context of what started this thread:
> I was a kid/teenager with a really slow computer [...] b) I think I was a way better programmer. Constraints make you better, you have to be smarter.
The goal is "write software" not "write optimized software".
When your goal is to write a software that runs on your machine, having the constraint of a slow machine forces you to write optimized code which is a slower, more difficult solution. When you have an unconstrained fast machine you can write boilerplate unoptimized code, which is quick and easy. If you constrain your fast computer you go from "easy solution" to "difficult solution" for the same goal of "write software". No programmer will ever say "making the computer slower really helped a lot to write code".
Your goal is "make a creative song" but you're stuck. You don't introduce constraints because they'll make it harder to get unstuck, you introduce them to make it easier. You literally said "they still help a lot".
> I frequently use this when stuck creatively in music production. [...] Really easy for me to skip these artificial constraints at any time, they still help a lot.
That's what you're missing. For you the real constraint would be to get creatively unstuck without any tricks. You are introducing things to help you reach your goal to get unstuck. You're expecting programmers to introduce things that prevent them from reaching their goal of creating programs that run.
In reality one huge reason software is slow and unoptimized is because programmers have beefy machines and can afford to take the easy road.
I didn't expect this simple concept will need so many explanations.
> I didn't expect this simple concept will need so many explanations.
You and me both brother :)
> No programmer will ever say "making the computer slower really helped a lot to write code".
I guess I'll be the first, as a programmer I do this all the time, when developing browser stuff I frequently throttle the available bandwidth and introduce jitter in the network connections so I can see and understand how things work with less optimal network connections, loads of us professional programmers do this when aiming for high quality software meant for end-users, in loads of different environments, not just browser development. Making the computer/IO/whatever slower/"less" does help a lot to write software for others.
> You're expecting programmers to introduce things that prevent them from reaching their goal of creating programs that run.
Well, yes and no. I expect professional programmers, my peers, to do this, as this is how you typically build reliable software, but I don't expect everyone to do this, definitively not amateurs just programming for fun.
> Your goal is "make a creative song" but you're stuck. You don't introduce constraints because they'll make it harder to get unstuck, you introduce them to make it easier. You literally said "they still help a lot".
Cheers for the attempt to decide what my goal is but no, the goal never is "make a creative song", the goal is precisely as previously stated: "make a song". Helpful tip for the future, read and understand what people write and don't assume they lie or misunderstand their own intention, and it'll be easier to understand other's point of view.
Regardless, I feel like both of us are digged into our understanding what the whole "add constraints to do better" process means and is, and no harm no foul, what I know helps me and I'm sure what you know helps you, so lets just leave it at that :) Wish you the best of weekends!
You do that because your goal s “optimized code” not just “code”. Your constraints are a tool that helps you achieve your goal. For most others the constraints are limitations from achieving their goal.
For me wearing a parachute is a constrain and carrying it is an act of will. For a skydiver not so much.
> You do that because your goal s “optimized code” not just “code”.
Again, my goal is "Ship working software", I don't care about optimizing at all, just baselevel "working" state of things, that's why I test things like reliability. But also again, our perspectives and understanding of terms seems to diverge a bunch, so much that discussing them seems relatively fruitless, at least seemingly to the two of us.
I feel exactly the same way. Though one extra factor is that I feel like my time was so pure back then. Now, with multiple degrees, I keep thinking about weird concepts like 'opportunity cost'. There was no opportunity cost when I was a kid. There was just time. Bucketloads of it!
I enjoy going back to basics every once in a while; do Arduino / embedded programming on a shitty netbook (it came with Windows but it has only 32GB of storage so it couldn't even update), build games / stuff in Pico-8, start a new Go project with just the main toolkit, etc.
Yes, true creativity usually or mostly comes from real constraints, in my experience.
As, if there are no constraints in some specific area, there is no kinda "survival need" to improve there, hence brain is not working as hard/smart/deep as it could.
Re: making things about me (but also kind of related), I am working on a project that requires sending encrypted telemetry data from a Crazyflie drone (so, STM32) and it's such a fun experience. Each telemetry payload is just 26B so I had to get creative, write down packet diagrams and then make it work in C. An AI agent helps a bit with some stuff but you're mostly on your own.
In general I highly recommend going the embedded/IoT way if you look for challenges and constraints.
The difference between today and 30 years ago is that if you are an individual developer, you are at the complete mercy of a single company (Valve), who can force you to do essentially anything they want for the privilege of publishing on their platform, with no meaningful alternative, and zero recourse if they say “no”.
Even if Valve holds a significant market share of the PC Gaming market, this is a harsh conclusion. There are other significantly more expensive and restrictive options, such as the Windows Store for Windows, or the Play Store for Android, or the App Store for iOS and MacOS.
PC has much free-er and more accessible options for indie developers, like itch.io. It's probably the least monopolistic gaming market out there.
The struggle of course is advertising and reach, not sure who the gate keepers for that were with TTD, maybe magazines?
Steam (which I'm guessing you're talking about) is nowhere close of being a monopoly. There are loads of alternatives out there, in wide use by people already. World of Warcraft, League of Legends, Minecraft, Roblox and more are all examples of big time successful games that never been available on Steam.
I would even go further, and say that this logic applies not just for massive games from massive publishers, but platforms like GoG works well as an alternative for indies.
Plus, consider the software distribution situation in the pre-Internet world. There was getting someone to arrange for very-limited-time distribution in physical stores (and paying out the ass for the privilege), or paying to advertise your mail-order distribution, or encouraging BBS operators to distribute your shareware that includes a "Mail $AMOUNT to this address and we'll mail you a full copy." message inside.
Of those options, the BBS one is probably the lowest cost, but -"shockingly"- that option is still available today... and is probably way easier for people to find your software than it was back in the day.
There are astroturfers out there who pretend that Steam is The Worst Thing Ever, but they distribute your game, dev-selected old (and pre-release) versions of your game, promotional materials for your game, and host forums and a news feed... forever. Valve also pretty clearly chooses to distribute games that are in the intersection of what's legal to distribute in the US and what the busybodies at MasterCard and Visa permit them to distribute.
If we lived in a just world, because of MasterCard's and Visa's enormous size, they'd be declared as something like "payment processors of last resort" and required to process transactions for anything that's legal to sell in the US, and subject to enormous fines if they so much as suggest to any merchant that MC/Visa will stop processing that merchant's payments for any reason other than a clear and obvious history of fraud.
If you think about how much time a single developer has to invest to create all the assets for such a massive game, 11 years doesn't sound like a lot of time...
(assuming he did all the assets himself and didn't use AI, which might be a bit naive)
I have said it for a few years now. If Epic ever decided to go public on the stock market, I would throw a significant amount of my savings at them. Their technology is astounding.
Yes, some games have some issues but it really seems like that is a problem of developers not knowing when to say 'No!' to the giant tool kit they have been provided.
I'm not sure myself, as there's Epic the ligitous games company that wants more money from Fortnite, Epic the attempted digital games platform whose main userbase just claims a free game once every two weeks, and Epic the engine company.
I have more faith in Epic the engine company than the other Epics.
In development, you don't have the privilege of using optimised culling and LODs. For rapid development, very little code is compiled & there are extra IDE tools running.
When you consider that 16GB has become the minimum requirement for modern A+ titles (with the Windows OS & background tasks squating on 4-6GB). Creating such a title might be difficult on memory limited machine.
Unreal had made some improvements in this regard recently, with direct from storage assets loading & stuff.
I can tell you right now, from an M5 with 16 GB of RAM, I'd be hard pressed to squeeze a bit of ram for a game of sodoku if I'm already running an Android emulator plus a few IDEs and 10 tabs in Chrome... Being able to produce something of note, especially in the gaming space, with 16 GB of ram IS a feat in and of itself
Surely better than this engineer having to pay $100k upfront which would likely mean he never made the game at all. 5% over a million seems pretty reasonable to me. I guess it'd be an issue if profit margins were thin, but that wouldn't be the case here.
But it is free up to $1mm in revenue. Anyone can go and download the engine and use it as much as they want free. It is really smart and honestly $1mm is a generous entry point to capture a royalty for everyone involved.
To be able to use this tech in the first place? I have no glue about business problems but this sounds far better then the 30% rip off by apple and Google app stores....
By the way you don't only have to file a report for Epic whenever you release a game using UE, you also have to report them your yearly sales and calculate what income is "directly attributable to UE" for that game. For an ordinary small person, for whom you imply lifetime 5% off gross worldwide revenue is a "happy problem", this is way more involved (and prone to legal liability) compared to app stores. You will probably have to hire people well before the million mark to make sure numbers are OK and you don't accidentally owe Epic $$$$$.
I know which model I would choose. Probably the one where I raise prices by 30% and don't have to deal with anything else.
At the point where you have 1 million in revenue you for sure have an accountant even just to do your yearly business taxes. So reporting to Epic just becomes an extra hour of work to make the report.
Should unreal give away their work for free? What is your argument. They don’t take a single royalty until $1mm and 5% is not a wild number considering it’s making use of the engine.
Heck steam takes 30% which is much more egregious but factoring in costs of running steam, payment processing and the free marketing its almost always worth it.
Share a counter argument to how it should be please.
If you get a million dollars in revenue as a solo dev, it's pretty much just winning the lottery. You've already spent all the working hours to make the game, so it's pretty much all profit at that point. What costs do you even have?
It's a free choice to use the engine, you can use another engine or make your own if 5% is too much for you.
I mean, if he makes a boatload of money then it's fine if a fraction of it goes to the engine. When his immediate needs are met, he can choose to either stay with unreal or move to an alternative later on without cost pressures.
Yep, and then we always get those regular posts "project XYZ is no longer", yeah people not paying.
Unreal is free to the extent it contributes to bringing even more people into the ecosystem, eventually becoming paying customers, Epic doesn't make it available out of their kindness, rather also taking into account there are other competing alternatives.
It's important to keep development going but commercial projects is not the only way. Godot Foundation exists and there are plenty of others in open-source space.
A nonprofit means actual reports about how money is used, and it's not as if commercial projects are somehow better because they don't fold or get sold or canceled.
And even between commercial ways, charging royalties is one of the worst. It doesn't cost Epic extra if my game starts making more money. Just make the engine a one-time purchase (per version, so you get to keep sales going) and everyone will be much happier. Sell additional services which actually do cost you money to keep up (multiplayer hosting).
I love Godot but it's not a particularly brilliant example of what you are trying to say. Many games made with Godot generate more profit than the entire budget of the engine itself.
The engine itself is far from cutting edge and missing several features that are now quite common elsewhere, like texture streaming, bindless textures, etc. The speed of development isn't blazing fast either (see the implementation of the traits system).
Devs are excellent at what they do but one could wonder how much faster and further it could go with more fundings.
Nothing against Godot, it's a great project, but looking at the wikipedia list of notable games using the engine, there's a single one I have heard of. Meanwhile about 28% of the market share of all video games is using Unreal. So I don't really see the need to make "everyone much happier" honestly.
> Sell additional services which actually do cost you money to keep up
After a game has been released a solo dev often has very little work to do, since they've already invested all of the development time ahead of release. So, by this logic they shouldn't really be allowed to charge anything for the game, except to cover potential work on updates.
Perhaps game projects don't need to operate like nonprofits, but then why do game engine projects?
There are notable games missing from that list. Unrailed 2, for example, which is, in my opinion, one of the best games ever created. I am not even a avid gamer and I recognize several games from that list.
Well then exactly what I was saying. This is a business & it's a commercial product, not a freebie. This is why I see many people look at UE but go with Godot. It's nice when you don't have to notify a megacorp about every game you release & then follow up with yearly revenue reports.
I always wonder how a solo developer can source high quality assets like these, plus develop a full game with them. In this case did the dev create the assets or did they purchase them from a freelancer? How much would purchasing this many assets cost?
Almost every time I see a halfway polished “solo developer” game, they did not do all the work themselves. Especially, they usually hire out the music, maybe other sounds, and much of the artwork. Sometimes they also have freelancers doing marketing and such. Sometimes even some paid help writing the software.
I highlight this not to bring those developers down, but because I think it’s important people understand how these things actually come to be, so they aren’t discouraged to try themselves by thinking they ought to actually be doing 100% of the work solo. That’s pretty rare.
The perception of what a polymath is is changing incredibly fast, as both the floor and ceiling for being passable or outstanding in any field is rising exponentially. For the last 50-oddish years, it's been the case that being proficient with a single piece of software can make you an invaluable asset in industry; understanding the concepts behind the software and the problems it solves even moreso. Rather recently, we've reached a point where software ergonomics, freely available education and information, and even AI assistance in development or usage have lowered this floor in terms of cost, knowledge, effort, and skill. For example, it's trivially easier today to create a 3d animation than it was 5, 10, or 20 years ago, and the visual quality of it would be similarly disproportionately better.
The domains of different crafts are ever-expanding, including all of their history and all new developments, of which new developments seem to be coming at an ever-increasing pace as populations grow, internet access grows, and the free time of populations spent doing things other than merely surviving grows. There is a larger and broader base of knowledge necessary for a person to be considered competent in the current state of anything, and the number of disciplines is also increasing. Two decades ago, having a person specializing in frontend development for a specific web browser would have been unthinkable.
All of this work is built upon the backs of other people. Game engines, 3d modeling and texturing and animating, language design and implementation, audio software and sound design, graphics libraries, runtime optimizations, operating system APIs, networking improvements, distribution networks, etc. etc.. To think that any one person could possibly create everything they use to then create these final products, no matter the scale they are, is ignorant.
> For example, it's trivially easier today to create a 3d animation than it was 5, 10, or 20 years ago, and the visual quality of it would be similarly disproportionately better.
True, but this also means that the bar has risen for animations in general, so while you might be able to create animations today as an amateur that is even better than the animations just five years ago, it still won't come close to what professionals can actually achieve today.
Your very last point speaks a lot to me though, almost every effort people are amazed by have at least two people involved, indirectly or directly, and attempting things like this on your own would be a fool's errand.
I depends on the background. I'm 2 years into solo developing a game and all programming, artwork and animation is my own. I had to invest into quite some learning to make it possible, but I figured it's a worthwhile investment.
I do work with a composer, though.
Point being, it depends on which skills you bring to the table, which ones you are willing to learn and which ones are worth collaborating on.
I still think the term Solo-developer is justified in any case. The one who soley carries the burden of bringing the game from idea to the finish line is the solo developer, IMHO.
If a project is far more work than one person can do (as this train simulator obviously is), the term solo developer is no more justified than it would have been if Steve Jobs claimed to have solo-developed the iPhone, even if he could have justified saying he "brought the iPhone from idea to the finish line."
Solo developer just means they developed the game themselves, not made it all themselves. I'm not sure how you could write what you wrote without that occurring to you.
Absolutely not obvious to me, especially since I have heard a lot of solo dev stories that insist it was purely a 1-person project. And it’s true in some cases.
In that case, please, define "developed the game" for us. Is doing all the programming "developing" the game? Is coming up with the game design and hiring programmers "developing" the game?
What if you hire voice actors for each of the characters? And level designers? And animators? At what point does it stop being a solo project? Only when outside investors get involved? Or does it only stop being "solo" if those investors demand board seats? Or can it _still_ be considered "solo" even then?
It's not so much about the assets as the framing, lighting, positioning and blending it all in a compelling way. For instance in the trailer I recognize the large brick building at 0:14 from a cheap/free asset pack, though I don't recall which. And look at it - it's super generic copy/paste layering with some slight variations, and seemingly baked on lighting given the identical shading per floor/layer. But put in a well lit scene with appropriate framing, and suddenly you're here thinking it's a high end custom built asset.
Now a days you can also get basically endless assets for free. Unreal gives away a new pack every few weeks or so on Fab (and has been doing this for years), KitBash3D gives occasionally gives away some amazing assets, and many more. But again none of this matters without some serious artistic and style sense. Given I recognize at least one asset there, I'd imagine a good chunk of his assets are from stuff like this. But you're not going to be able to clone anything comparable even if you had the exact assets he used. Placement and such is way more of an artistic thing than you might expect.
Anecdote, but I recall my friend saying he worked on freelancing assets to some train game and showed me some pictures of the said game. Unless there are more of these in existence, I think it was this.
It wouldn't surprise me if Japan has its own market for train assets. There's a big community of train simulators! Go to the Kyoto or Tokyo train museums, they have dozens where you step into a replica of a train cab and then drive a photorealistic simulation (sometimes also just film) - the ex-keyboarder for Casiopeia runs a train simulation game company that makes those since the 90s (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minoru_Mukaiya). There are some Nintendo Switch train simulators like Densha de GO that are only available in Japan.
I'm sure there's a treasure trove of already-built high-quality assets of Japanese trains.
You can buy them overseas from online secondhand stores like mandarake and play on your switch, because there is no region lock. Interface will still be in Japanese, but it is pretty obvious what to to and how.
I was looking at the controller support and apparently there are game controllers designed to follow the layout of a train operations controller with the same two levers that you can see in game.
There are lots of assets to purchase or even for free. majority of small devs will buy them, if they have money then will freelance. It’s very rare for one dev to do everything but do exist.
Assets are generally cheap, unity asset store itch.io
Unless you commission someone for work 1-2K would cover many small games easily.
I'm on the fence because I have a TSC-X controller and it's unclear if it's supported. Somebody on the forums posted a tool that converts generic joystick axes to keypresses, but not sure how well that works.
You make it sound like they didn’t even buy and run the game, but that’s not accurate.
> While the game encourages you to master the reasonably simple controls of its range of perfectly crafted engines, you can also just set it to play itself and then take over the free camera as it does.
That seems like a perfectly valid way to experience the game to me.
The author is "not exactly a train enthusiast" as they say, and nor are the vast majority of the audience . Yet the article presents the game in a way that sounds appealing to such an audience, potentially exposing it to more people than just the train fan niche. I think that alone makes it better than "terrible"
All journalism is terrible these days. They just want a catchy headline for the ad view and nothing else matters, including whether the headline is true or not.
Paid journalism is still often good (Bloomberg, FT). But yeah if you're just going to free sites it's the same as the free newspapers they used to give out for free in the subway - a few salacious articles, one or two ostensibly 'real news' pieces, and a bunch of ads.
The irony being, that youtubers and Twitch personalities have almost certainly played the games they are reviewing.
But they are considered at least a 'rung' lower than games journalists when it comes to how much access they have, and how much their opinion matters professionally.
what has improved a lot recently is the physically based rendering - specifically, the lighting. Looking at the steam page, this train game has that type of lighting.
Not to dismiss the effort by dev, but all Unreal engine games look photoreal these days. My point is that photorealism does not show effort these days.
Most of the review is about the art assets, and I doubt the big ones (e.g. the trains themselves) are off-the-rack Unreal assets. An engine like Unreal 5 will cast your assets in harsh relief. Which is to say, if your game's assets look custom and look good in Unreal 5, it does indeed demonstrate effort and skill.
It's the lighting etc that provide photo realism with Unreal. Even the demo that comes with Unreal where a robot is running around cubes on a small plain looks photoreal.
"Played properly, Running Train asks you to carefully control your speed, braking, and prompt, safe arrival at train stations, and rewards or penalizes you accordingly"
So it's basically a clone of 'Densha de go!' series.
A full-scale arcade version in this genre, evolving since 1996. Realistic controls, some seem even to include train crew uniforms you can wear while driving…
> is in fact set in a fictional region of Japan, but is created so lovingly that you’ll believe it’s real life.
This is actually a major cheat. Realism is expensive, and exposes your creation to the equivalent of the "uncanny valley" for vehicle simulation - the simulated world is never accurate enough and you can't help but notice the differences with reality. E.g. if you see generic buildings ("autogen") near a location you know IRL, the simulation feels immediately sloppy.
Yet, as long as I'm not interested in visiting real places, I would go for a vehicle simulation in a fictional world any day. I wouldn't mind if the vehicles were also fictional, as long as they require some technique to drive them. What matters in games is challenge and mastery, but not what you master; your RTS, FPS or chess skills have very little value IRL.
> Zoom out far enough—and for some reason it will let you—and you see the tiles, the roads that don’t line up, and the various tricks and techniques that allow it to look so realistic from low down. But don’t do that! That’s silly. This is a train sim, not a plane sim, you’ve no business in the sky.
OpenBVE one-upped BVE train sim with external cameras, and as a result you see all this too. In my eyes, they sort of miss the point of a train simulation: the view point is normally attached to the driver, so one can use all sorts of tricks to avoid having to "paint the entire wall" - which is quite important if you count on a community of fan modders who have limited resources.
I never got the appeal for these sim games. From the screenshots, it looks like a beautiful game and I guess I could enjoy the visuals for an hour or 2.
But I don't see how it'd entertain me for hours on end. If someone here is into these sim games, what's the reason you keep going back to them?
The simple pleasure of a job well done, even if the job is completely imaginary, because my real job is complex and stupid.
Driving the train is a little technical, but not overwhelmingly so. You need to pay attention to the gradient, speed, train weight and rail slipperiness to brake with perfect accuracy every time you come to a station. Signalling is not overly complex but you can benefit from tabbing over to a reference sheet every so often (Ah, double flashing yellow means we’re on a diverging route ahead with a reduced turnout speed so I must brake soon). Learning the german safety systems (PZB and LZB) was interesting. Guiding a 3000t freight train down a mountain isn’t something that can be rushed, it forces you to slow down and be patient.
So relaxation mostly. I can launch the game, drive something somewhere for an hour or two, get some endorphins because I did it all right, etc.
These Japanese style train sims are quite a bit less realistic, including fewer signals you need to know (Densha de GO!! essentially only has speed limits, g-forces, train load, and weather modeling.) and simplifying the controls to essentially a single handle that goes from full brake when pushed all the way forward to full traction when pulled toward you, with a switch you need to press to be able to pull it past neutral.
But in return they add very technically difficult tasks, such as stopping within a millimeter of the stopping point within a second of the time in the timetable without re-braking or making passengers uncomfortable, or stuff such as pointing at signals. They even add completely unrealistic stuff just for the sake of gameplay such as bonus zones where you need to stay at an exact speed, sounding the horn for overpasses and level crossings, or dimming the lights for oncoming trains.
They "feel" very different to games like Train Sim World, but I like them both regardless.
Imagine if we can replace all the locomotive drivers with pensions with retired software engineers who literally will pay to do the job remotely? Even better if there is a prediction market and twitch stream on top with bets for the most mundane things.
I play Euro Truck Simulator 2 (ets) and its my happy place, its just zen, Sometimes i will have a plugin that will get me local radio stations and i will cruise through italy and greece listening to talk shows in languages i don't understand, sometimes i will do it listening to the rumble of the truck, and i switch off, and allow my thoughts to run free.
I've recently started getting into flight sims, and i'm looking for the same sort of thing with that (the only problem with ets is the graphics still looks like a 2013 game) and i think i will get there, its just i'm at the 'learning to fly' stage, and thats kinda difficult. Well, actually flying is surprisingly easy, landing is the tricky bit ;-)
If you're flying a larger passenger plane into basically any major airport, ILS should get you most of the way down - you just need to control speed (you're looking for landing speed +10 by the end)
Depending where you're flying, some arrivals have gaps which threw me off massively when I first started - it's because IRL there's ATC there to guide you to the final intersection for the runway, usually 10NM out... so aim for that and capture ILS, it's quite a wide margin for capture.
If you're going manually, 10nm out you want to start descending at around 600-700fpm from ~3000ft and you should have visual on the runway at this point
After school I played countless hours of Euro Truck Simulator. It was an awesome escapism. Being a truck driver, driving through sun and snow, in different parts of Europe. Crazy drivers at night, needed to think quick in difficult situations.
I started playing Farm Simulator 2025 recently because a friend wanted me to. Even now, I really long for a proper game with progression, etc. But it's really just a way to drive machines.
And I find myself wanting to do that, even without the progression I crave from a game. But then I also feel like I'm massively wasting my time, and I could be playing other games, getting stuff done around the house, or just reading a book. Instead of driving a tractor for no freaking reason. But I still want to do it.
Have you ever wanted to try flying a plane or running a city or being a tycoon of roller coasters without having to invest much time, money, and energy to take flight lessons, run for political office, or work your way up through an amusement park company? Sim games let you play with these complex systems easily and walk away when you get bored.
I have often said that for many people that want to change the world (for the greater negative), they need to get addicted to Sim games. They will end up doing a lot less harm in that situation.
The real question is, how do you determine who is going to do negative or positive gains. A debate that is millennia old.
I get the impression he's not saying all sim games, but "drive the vehicle" sims in general. I have to agree. There's just nothing engaging about it imo.
Similar to you, I don't see the attraction of these sims.
I have a theory it is a mindfulness thing like many hobbies.
Think knitting or crochet or even building and running a model train set in the garage. These things aren't terribly hard once you learn the basics but you have to pay attention to various details over time and it allows you to tune out from the rest of the world when you want to.
A mind is slightly different from a body in that it really does not understand the concept of "off". It is movement by its very nature. Even its relaxation is expressed through activity. Simple repetition and continuous low-level positive feedback is a way for it to rest while moving.
For the same reason that the Vegas attraction “dig a bunch of holes with industrial diggers” was so popular: people want to do jobs they think are cool without years of training cost up front, and this is a way for them to do so.
Farming simulator and Car mechanic simulator are both in my todo list, because those are hobbies I’m truly interested in pursuing and I’d like to know what it’s like to do them as a sim first. Most other live sims like this are deeply uninteresting to me, even if they have lovely visuals. Meanwhile I’ve seriously considered buying a Renesas SH-2A simulator for nearly $3k so that I can develop better car software!
Is there some job you’ve always wanted to do that requires extensive training that you can’t / won’t complete at this time? That would be a use case for sims that’s less game and more hobby for you (but that’s always a blurry line for all of us so don’t take that as criticism).
I have never played any train sim, but I read video game press that this one hits different.
A lot of train sim are about building the rail network, where Running Train focuses on driving. The scenery (dozens of kilometers of japanese railway) is beautiful and it reproduces the japanese railway system realistically.
Like for some other simulation games, I am impressed how can some go to such lengths to get as close as possible to the real thing but would not actually do it as a job.
Not making fun of it, I just found it fascninating.
I can get it. I can totally see something being fun if it's 2-10 hours a week, but not fun if it's 40-50 hours a week.
Also very different when you are in control of exactly when you're doing it, you can pause anytime you need to go grab laundry, etc.
Driving/train sims have pretty much zero appeal to me, but I enjoy flight sims a fair amount. I'd never want to make the sacrifices to my life that would be required to be a commercial pilot. Being a personal/hobby pilot is very expensive and quite a bit more dangerous.
A lot of these train simulator games are a mix between job simulation and arcadey fun. To give a big example of the latter, in the Densha de GO!! games, the goal is to follow all the speed limits, brake gently without allowing the G-forces to exceed a certain amount, and to arrive at the station exactly on time while stopping at the exact right spot to the millimeter.
For some people, just the fact that it's a simulation is enough to make it fun. But to many others, the challenge (and I can promise you it is quite difficult) is what makes it a fun game.
I've been playing these games for half a decade now, and I've only managed a zero zero once (meaning that you come to a stop exactly on time to the second and stop within 0.0cm of the marker.)
There are studies explaining the appeal of the "chore simulators". You should look them up because I may not do them justice, but in a nutshell it's basically that they are very satisfactory because they present clear rules, they allow you to "do a job" and if you do it well, you progress. There are no tricks, no unexpected crisis, you do the thing, you get money, you get better gear, you do the thing better. This is escapism for people frustrated with "real life". Real life sucks. Sometimes you work hard and you still don't get "better gear".
Driving simulations - be it planes, cars, trucks, boats, etc - are maybe a bit different, but essentially it's just a combination of chill vibe, romanticized experience (the classic "I wish I could be a farmer", no you don't) and a degree of what I described above. Obviously there are also people who are just passionate about trains, planes and such.
The chill cozy games are a real trend, and it's due to what I described in the 1st paragraph.
Another notable, if old, train simulator from Japan is OpenBVE. It was easy to model railroads on it. Many short Brazilian routes were/are modeled in OpenBVE. It is particularly convincing since it simulates well the typical lateral wobbling that metric trains are known for.
Do you mean actual Brazilian railway track engineers used this game to plan/develop actual routes? Or just that you can play Brazilian routes in the game?
Looks beautiful and I am filled with an instant sense of nostalgia looking at the screenshots.
Personally if I were going to adopt a nerdy train hobby, I would tend more toward train photography. Recently train photographers have been in the news for mostly bad reasons [1], but I have also seen train photographers setting up in rural locations and the scenery looks stunning and also totally chill. The problems arise when people gather en masse to get the "iconic" shots that have been probably been photographed a million times before.
Or just go out and actually ride a bunch of different routes. It's been a long time since I've done it, but just riding a local or express train through a scenic area is delightful.
Of course there's no reason that true train afficianados can't do all of the above, as well as building model trains!
The one thing that is keeping me from riding the routes that I believe would be the must fun/scenic is the OBSCENE cost of those tickets. Granted, these aren't commuter tickets.
I would love a trip across the high plains and through the mountains by train. Just like I would love to take a cruise from the bottom of the Mississippi to the top.
In Japan it's quite reasonable to ride local trains. I've been meaning to do a trip along the recently re-opened Tadami Line [1], for example. The one way cost for the full 4-hour, 135km trip is only ¥2,750 ($17).
Though when you add in the costs of getting to the start/end of the line, overnight accomodations, and potentially the cost of getting to Japan first - it gets quite a bit more expensive. But staying at a little guesthouse along the way is also part of the charm.
You probably won't enjoy it because it's a sim game and not fun in the same way Super Mario Bros is. But it's probably more interactive than Mixtape since you are operating a train.
I personally probably won't play Mixtape or this game but both look like good experiences to me if you are in the respective target audience.
At least in my experience, every single game I've launched has worked on Linux. I don't play online shooter games which seems to be the only category that doesn't work.
FWIW, many online shooter games work just fine. Those with extremely invasive kernel-level anticheat do not. Some of those with less-invasive anticheat also do not.
So, yeah, shit like the latest CoD, Valorant, Apex Legends [0], and that godawful Marathon game won't run... but that's because of active work by the devs to make it so that it won't.
I game on Linux (have so for years) and the only thing I can't play is a few AAA FPS titles. Honestly not much of an issue depending on what games you play.
I see that MS is trying to force anti cheat stuff out of lower level OS rings. They may unintentionally allow future compatibility with Linux compatibility layers. That is a funny situation.
...and yet out of 280 multiplayer games in my library 200 are marked as Deck Verified or Playable (and most of the rest has no rating available). Also, looks like all of your examples are from a single particular niche.
It should be acknowledged, yes, but not while failing to mention that it mostly applies to the genre of competitive shooters. "Generally don't run" doesn't apply to pretty much anything else, where a statement closer to truth would be "generally run, with some notable exceptions".
> ...where a statement closer to truth would be "generally run, with some notable exceptions".
Yep. Devs usually have to actively make their game not work on Proton for it to not work on the version of Proton that Steam ships. Most devs aren't so petty as to put in that extra work, so they don't.
I do not play multiplayer games, and it has come to the point where I don't even check Proton compatibility on these because it is so reliable now in that situation.
There are a very small minority of games that use kernel-level anticheat that won't work, including newer BF6 and COD. Tbh I wouldn't play those anyway because of that feature, which sucks because BF series was fun.
I enjoyed the hell out of BF I and BF V. I also enjoy shooters that have "modern" weaponry. Given how fun BF I was at launch, and V was when I picked it up, I purchased a copy of BF 2042 at launch because -given that that's the time before the "I'm going to do nothing but snipe from spawn to maxxximise my KDR and get Sick Youtube Clips" crew comes to be the majority of the playerbase- that's the best time to play these games.
I regret that purchasing decision so much. BF 2042 was very, very pretty. It looked so good. But -as a game- it was so bland and boring.
Steam needs a statistic for Wine/crossover. I play tons of games on my mac via steam through crossover. It's crazy that multiple layers of translation work so well.
A pattern I’ve found useful in other settings is starting with code for an existing “game” that sort of resembles what you want to make and then modifying components until you have a whole new game but it shares similar infrastructure to the original. So you benefit from the existing system and avoid a lot of problems.
That's the part that is visible to everyone else, so that's the part that an LLM can see. That means someone else can clone your ideas and aesthetics. The ol' double-edged sword.
If the Touhou games or Cave Story were released today, all of Hackernews would be like "dude, I wonder what their LLM workflow is like!" Japanese solo hikikomori devs have been putting out insane stuff since long before LLMs emerged.
Not really, those games are very simple code wise. A high schooler could do it (source me).
You could make a bullet hell game engine as a project in an intro CS course.
The hard part is the content in the game, and ZUN was already a composer. That just leaves the code which is easy, and the bullet patterns, which ZUN clearly improved at through his earlier games. (and the art, which is famously bad though endearing)
The other comment said that obviously no solo dev do everything by himself. They must have asset maker or song maker who do all things mostly uncredited. But, here we are, of course there are true solo devs!
> Not really, those games are very simple code wise. A high schooler could do it (source me).
That very much depends on how much they did themselves. If they used unity, and went very light on the simulation, sure.
> You could make a bullet hell game engine as a project in an intro CS course.
No you couldn’t. Well you could but it wouldn’t be appropriate for actual beginners unless you stripped it down so much that calling it an engine was meaningless.
> No you couldn’t. Well you could but it wouldn’t be appropriate for actual beginners unless you stripped it down so much that calling it an engine was meaningless.
You definitely can. One of the assignments in the CS intro course I took was a bullet hell game. "calling it an engine was meaningless" is an opinion that requires ignoring the fundamentals of what a game engine is.
A game engine is a framework that allows you to create games. Assuming you don’t have tons of content (and I’m sure you didn’t in an intro CS class), building a game is an easier task than building a game engine.
Let me ask you this. What were the parameters of your assignment? What libraries were you allowed to use.
By modern standards, yes, writing a bullet hell shooter game is not hard.
But ZUN started on the PC-98.
To put that platform in a western context, imagine if IBM had gone with planar graphics for VGA. Or an Amiga with no coprocessors, sprites, or scrolling[0]. You have a lot of pixels to fill and no help to do it with. It can't even run DooM[1]. Most other developers threw their hands up and shipped RPGs, erotic visual novels, or porn. Getting a fast action game running on PC-98 is a genuine accomplishment.
[0] I am aware that I just described a compact Macintosh.
It actually seems to be a relatively small vocal group. I've marked most of them red (as I previously did the one above) with https://hackersmacker.org
Am I the only one that thinks the word "pretty" is overused to describe the visual quality and artistry of games? I see this word thrown around often and it feels so low-effort.
Looks very realistic, however I have to question the whole premise of a train sim, trains seem to be the most boring vehicle to choose here, they run in tracks so not much freedom, basically accelerate and brake.
Then you know nothing about trains and the track networks they run on, which is probably why you dont find them interesting. Thats fine, just realise there is much more to trains than accelerate and brake :)
Well TBF OP is more or less correct, and I say this as a person who is pretty much into trains (although not train sims specifically). All a conductor can do is accelerate and brake - respect speed limits, brake in time so you don't overrun the platform at the next station (for passenger trains), be on the lookout for people/vehicles crossing the tracks illegally (and hope that they get out of the way fast enough, because once you see them, it's usually too late to stop in time, unless the train is really slow), be careful (especially when you have a freight train) not to be too slow before an incline, otherwise you might not make it all the way up etc. etc. Where you go is not your decision, the points are set remotely.
There is a lot more than that. Monitoring things like power generation, fuel, breaking ability, wheel heating sensors, managing door systems, human aspects like reading signals and lights and deciding what to do, all the way down to simple things like horns, wipers, and lights. Its pretty much exactly the same as a car but without a steering wheel and lots of added electrical systems.
Would you say a car is just accelerate, breaking, and steering?
Just my experience from being on planes, they take off, cruise, slow down and land, am I missing anything?
...seriously, 99%+ of the job of a conductor (and of a pilot) could be automated, the reason you still have a person (or two) in the cockpit is the rest of the time. As the saying goes, "flying is hours and hours of boredom sprinkled with a few seconds of sheer terror". And the same is also valid for trains. There are automated trains, but AFAIK all of them are metros or people movers where the whole system is closed off (platform doors etc.) and track conditions are closely monitored. I'm not aware of an automated train running on a "traditional" track network.
Cmon planes move is 3 axis (yes trains technically do but not via the controls) and take-off landing is a lot more complex than leaving/stopping at a station, the comparison is crazy.
Being able to use the Unreal Engine for free to develop this is awesome. This couldn't have happened 10 years ago.
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