Train sim created by just one person is being called the best ever made

> 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.

> 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.

> 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.

They're insanely popular in Japan.

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.