I have almost no appreciation for trains and I’m incredibly interested in trying this.
Train sim created by just one person is being called the best ever made
101–110 of 375 posts
Re: Train sim created by just one person is being called the best ever made
#102Looks 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!
[1] https://petapixel.com/2025/12/15/japanese-railway-pleads-wit...
Re: Train sim created by just one person is being called the best ever made
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
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)
> 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 c…
> 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.
Re: Train sim created by just one person is being called the best ever made
#104I read the title and assumed this was going to be about Transport Tycoon.
Re: Train sim created by just one person is being called the best ever made
#105Looks 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…
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.
But them tickets is too high.
Re: Train sim created by just one person is being called the best ever made
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
This place has become an AI-focused hellscape. It really is sad.
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
Thanks for the recc, very cool extension!
Re: Train sim created by just one person is being called the best ever made
#107It’s beautiful. I wonder how much an LLM was involved if at all.
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.
"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
"Don't be snarky."
"Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community." It's reliably a marker of bad comments and worse threads.
Re: Train sim created by just one person is being called the best ever made
#108I 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?
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.)
Re: Train sim created by just one person is being called the best ever made
#109I 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 re…
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.
edit: This actually sounds awesome
Re: Train sim created by just one person is being called the best ever made
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
Japan has a history of train-driving sims: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Train_simulator#Driving_simula...
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.