Simutrans: a Transport Tycoon-style game

Simutrans is a simulation game of free code under Artistic License 1.0 for Windows, AmigaOS, BeOS, Mac OS X and Linux that focuses on the transport of goods, passengers, mail and energy. Al same which Transport Tycoon or Railroad Tycoon, the main objective of Simutrans is to create a stable economy, as well as to grow the company and avoid bankruptcy.

Simutrans allows you to modify the terrain, build roads and rails, build different types of stops, terminals and vehicles (including buses, trains, trucks, ships, airplanes and more recently monorails). It is also possible to create a power line network. It can be played with up to 6 players controlled by the computer's AI, distinguished by the color scheme.

Simutrans is multilingual, and includes an option to completely darken the screen at night, showing the lights of cities and vehicles. Recent versions include a beginner mode, a freeplay option that allows you to be in the red without going bankrupt.

Graphic Paksets

Simutrans was designed in such a way that the game engine was separate from the game's graphics engine, this means that it is possible to easily replace all the game graphics if necessary. This has led to the development of multiple graphics paksets (known as paksets), maintained by different developers.

The standard graphics pakset is known as pak64, and it is the one that can usually be seen in game screenshots. This was the original graphics packet and it has changed a lot since the first versions of Simutrans. The Pak128 has been developed to create a more detailed graphics set, whose image size is approximately twice the size of the graphics on the pak64. There are other paksets based on pak64 or pak128. More recently the 96 × 96 pixel measurements have been used to develop the pak96.comic, whose simple and colorful style has been very popular in the community. Currently there are Pak 64, Pak 96.comic, Pak 128, Pak German, Pak Japan and Pak128.Britain.

There has been an attempt to port the graphics from Transport Tycoon to create a pak and use it in Simutrans, this project is known as SimuTTD.

Installation

Fortunately, Simutrans already comes in the Ubuntu repositories and many other popular distros. Anyway, in case a version for your distro is not available, you can always download the binary for Linux. Once downloaded, unzip it and run the simutrans file

./simutrans