I have been working for a number of years on a fork of the moderately popular open source transport simulation game Simutrans, my fork, also open source, being Simutrans-Experimental (probably soon to be renamed "Simutrans-Extended"; it is these days not so much an experiment as it was back in 2008/9, but a fully fledged fork aiming to extend the basic features of Simutrans to add more operational and economic depth and realism). I have not spent much time so far on this forum because I tend to discuss issues relating to the game on dedicated international Simutrans forum, which includes specific subforums for Simutrans-Experimental.

Over the years, there have been a number of people who have very helpfully contributed useful coding and graphics work for which I am forever grateful and indebted, and the coding team for the original version ("Simutrans-Standard") have also always been extremely helpful (and I able to merge in changes and fixes to Standard into Experimental periodically). However, there are currently no other coders working regularly on Experimental, although I do get lots of helpful bug reports on the fourm from users who are able to compile the latest development versions from source, and most of the graphics/data work can be shared with the Standard version, so that is maintained.

As anyone who has worked on a coding proejct of this nature may know, it takes a very long time indeed for a single person to work through a large pile of featuers/bug fixes/balancing issues when coding alone. My aim has always been (and largely remains) to get the game to a point where I can undertake a full balancing of the in-game cost of the very large number of in-game assets (vehicles, stations, tracks, canals, etc.), and then, in its properly balanced state, promote it online a little with Youtube videos and the like in the hope of attracting general interest from transport enthusiasts, a small proportion of whom might go on to contribute to the code. However, the process of adding the features that I have calculated as necessary to allow the game to balance well using figures extrapolated from real life data on the costs of the in-game assets previously mentioned is taking rather a long time (at the current rate, it is likely to take me working alone over a year from now) and I notice that there seems to have been some falling off of interest owing to a lack of any releases since 2014 (I took a year off working on the project in 2014/2015 when I moved house, which did not help).

Are there people here with experience of working on open source projects who are able to give some insight into how best to attract other coders to contribute? Having even one or two reasonably competent coders contributing even sporadically to make small UI improvements, for example, or fix minor bugs would be of considerable assistance, although even more helpful would be people interested in working on core balance-critical features.

I did wonder whether to post this in the classifieds section, but since what I am asking for is thoughts on how best to encourage coders rather than directly asking for coders (not that Ishould say no to anyone who, seeing this post, is minded to contribute), I though it more appropriately posted here.

I should be most interested in people's views on the subject.

For reference, Simutrans (including Simutrans-Experimental) is released under the Artistic Licence 1.0 and is programmed in C++; it is a cross-platform game, supporting Windows, Mac and Linux (and also BeOs, although I do not believe that anybody has tried to compile Experimental for this platform, so I do not know whether that works).