A slightly belated announcement: Simutrans-Extended, an open source hobby project on which I have been working (with the help of others) for some years (and which was until recently called "Simutrans-Experimental") is now playable online.
It is still in an early access phase of development, as the financial aspects are not fully balanced yet, but getting this to work online after having added multi-threading support last year is a considerable achievement.
Simutrans-Extended is a fork of the mature open source transport simulator Simutrans, with an emphasis on operational and economic realism. See here for more information on how to download Simutrans-Extended for Windows or Linux.
Once downloaded and installed, connecting to the online server ("Bridgewater-Brunel") that I have set up for testing should be easy: just select "play online" from the menu that appears when the game first starts, select the server from the list (there may be just the one server in the list), and click "play online".
Currently, I am running just a brief test for stability and performance with a very large map created by a user, but the aim is in due course to have long-term semi-persistent games with multiple players. A game can last up to about 270 in-game years (i.e. from 1750 to the present day), and, as each in-game year lasts about a day in real time, the game can last about 9 months before needing to be re-set.
I should be very grateful for any feedback on the stability and performance aspects of the testing server for the present. If anybody would like to work on the game to help to add planned features, please get in touch - although I am slowly getting through the work necessary to get the game to a point where the financial aspects can be balanced, any help would be welcome.
