Simutrans 25th Anniversary #6: James Petts, the Ex-Father

One of the greatest honours an open-source project can have is to generate enough interest so that other people consider making their own versions of it. Simutrans, being a successful open source project, is no exception, and the greatest of those versions is Simutrans Extended (formerly Simutrans Experimental). Today, we will take a closer look at this fantastic fork with the help of his creator, James Petts. _____________________________________________

First of all, introduce yourself. Who are you? Where do you live? What did you study? Where are you working or have worked on the past?

I am James Petts, and I live in London. My education and professional life are in the law.

How does a man of law end up doing software development in his spare time?

As with many open source developers, I started work on what eventually became the Extended fork of Simutrans because I wanted to see features in the game that were not present. I remember playing Simutrans in around 2007, shortly after the British railway vehicles had first become available as an addon for Pak128. I enjoyed it, but found that there were certain things that were not quite right for what I wanted.

I remember making some feature requests on the forum, but the developers were not interested in implementing them, so I thought that I could implement them myself. This was in around 2008. They were initially written as patches for Simutrans, intended to be part of the main codebase, but they were not integrated, so I eventually just made my own fork. I think that I had a different idea as to what made a good game than the developers of of the original Simutrans; but also, I imagine that, as I was only just learning C++, the coding quality of my patches at the time was not what it should have been.

Once I had started adding features, I realised that there were more and more that were desirable, and I ended up spending more time developing the game than actually playing it; and the more complex features that were added, the more bugs that needed to be fixed and the more pakset work needed to implement the features.

Has Simutrans been your only experience with open source software development, or have you ever contributed to any other open source project?

Simutrans has indeed been my only experience with open source software. I have briefly contemplated contributing to other things, but I only have the one lifetime to live, and open source development is extremely time consuming.

And what do you devote your life to when not working and doing Simutrans development?

When not working or developing Simutrans, I enjoy photography, baking and railway modelling. The latter has entailed me having a sizeable shed built in my garden for several model railway layouts, and I am also a member of the Model Railway Club in London. As may be anticipated, there is some overlap between Simutrans and railway modelling.

James' model railway.

How did you know Simutrans? What was your first contribution?

I cannot remember exactly how I came across it now. I think that I was searching for transport based games to play in around 2007, and found Simutrans and thought it interesting; I think that I had considered Open TTD, but this was at a time when only the executable was available, and one already had to have Transport Tycoon Deluxe to play it; had the original Transport Tycoon, but not the Deluxe version, hence could not