How Pizza Tycoon simulated traffic on a 25 MHz CPU
pizzalegacy.nl
pizzalegacy.nl
I used to deal only with "ice cream" (illegal weapons) trading, buying in one city and selling them on another, to quickly earn lots of money, and then buying commercial spots but never opening them (too much hassle, having to micro-manage shops).
But after having bought about 200 or so, the game would inevitably crash a few weeks after my save file, so in the end I stopped playing it. I never got the exact details about the bug, but I hope this remake won't have it!
Besides that, the most fun thing was trying weird pizza recipes and seeing that the taste algorithm was a bit weird. I could put lots of chicken, or pineapple, and mix a few ingredients, and have some age groups rate them very highly.
But sabotaging the competition was still funnier than handling a normal business.
... but they'll be just as entertaining?
that pizza will set you back 0 USD because rounding error, the dough is free (if I remember well) and a bit of minced tomato is less than a rounding error, so effectively zero
then you sell the pizza for the lowest price
customers will hate it, but the price is so good
you don’t even need ice cream anymore
Two elderly women are at a Catskill mountain resort, and one of 'em says, "Boy, the food at this place is really terrible." The other one says, "Yeah, I know; and such small portions."
Eg storing the delta between items rather than tracking position directly, because the distance between cars is static for the length of the road, except during compression, insertion or removal of a car
The main difference from factorio belts I think is actually in the insertion — if there’s no room in the belt, insertion is blocked; whereas I’d expect a car to “slip in”.
But I think you can still say that maintains the property that a compressed belt will always be compressed, excepting insert/removal; and insertion/removal just requires updating a static number of deltas (2, in the middle of the line, 1 at the end of it)
The thing is a belt is modeled in terms of deltas rather than positions--there is no need to move each object each cycle. An object has a distance from the object in front. When the belt moves forward this relationship does not change--no need to update every pointer (and there can be a *lot* of belts in the game!) If the head of a belt can't move you only need to update one delta--the gap between the first free item and the stuck item in front of it and that value can already be known, no need to search. If you move the free item up against the stuck item you walk down the belt to find the new first free item.
You only need to modify the belt model if something is either added or removed from the belt. Objects get removed only by inserters, inserters examine only one cell of the belt, grabbing anything in that cell that matches what they are willing to grab (if they are feeding a machine they will only grab what the machine wants, otherwise they'll respect the filter list assigned to them.) When something gets added to a belt you add it to the list and update the delta of the object behind. No general update of the belt is needed in any situation, any more than you need to do anything to the items in a queue as you add and remove items.
Factorio is a game about optimization and the developers did a very good job of applying that idea to the game math. That is, until the masses of asteroids in the Space Age DLC.
This post also explains why compressed belts are better for performance on very large bases. But despite 1000+ hours in the game I never reached a point where performance was an issue.
At each choice cell, you just weigh the turn lower than going straight when randomly deciding. And if you don't want U-turns, you set a rule like it describes, or any sort of "cooldown" on turning.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pGCoLh3NL7g
It's all about the lanes and the flow.
There were many games growing up that gave me such a warped view of what was to be expected from the hardware. Battletoads, Crash Bandicoot, Marathon Trilogy (Macintosh), Age of Empires (Multiplayer), Roller Coaster Tycoon (of course).
8bit like Nes (Nesjam late may/june), Gameboy(GBJam was last year, bi-annual), Atari,etc, but also for MSDOS, Amiga and more "mid-school" platforms together with semimodern like PS1.
Now, even with modern tools it's plenty of work to get impressive things working on older platforms (I had a Gameboy techdemo last time there was a compo that's due to grow ridiculously much).
Maybe an issue would be people not all having the same type of hardware though? Maybe you target an emulator. (Some Fantasy Consoles sort of count here?)
I haven't looked expensively but some of the retro themed jams were missing the "spirit" I was expecting.
I did a Nokia jam a while back — monochrome, beeps — and I remember being kind of annoyed that the rules technically allowed 3D Unity games as long as they followed resolution and color palette.
(A 3D cube spinning on a TI calculator is a different matter ;)
Speaking of your last comment: while very impressive, I feel a bit disappointed when someone's done something amazing with a Game Boy or SNES or whatnot, but the solution involves shoving an entire computer in the cartridge. This is still very cool but your console just becomes a head unit for your GTX 4080 or whatnot.
They definitely do. I recommend GP check out PICO-8 which has some VERY real games on it like the original Celeste (by its original creators), Cattle Crisis, POOM, Combo Pool, Into Ruins, Dank Tomb, UFO Swamp Odyssey, Porklike, and much more. Most of which you can play on Itch.io for free in your browser.
I’ve been having a blast making a “real” and very full-featured PICO-8 game to serve as a “market fit” prototype — if a PICO-8 game on Itch gets meaningful attention, I’ve “found the fun” and therefore I should make “the full version” (non-PICO-8) for Steam, etc.
Reminds me of this. I found their video that had a breakdown of some of what they needed to do to make a game fit on NES really fascinating!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frontier:_Elite_II
You could do the slingshot effect in it.
For older games, I would say the original Prince of Persia. I played it on an 8088 machine, and it was pretty impressive how he made the animations sophisticated and smooth.
The English version had some bizarre translation quirks, but those just add to the retro charm.
One time I found a bug where the game would crash if you followed a courier into an enemy HQ building while they had guards inside (I guess they kill the courier, which then leads to a null reference or something?). When the game crashed I was so scared that I had broke my grandpa's computer. Good times.
The only thing it was missing was multiplayer. I hope that somebody creates a full OpenRCT2 style remake of it someday; it has so much potential for online multiplayer and wacky mods.
There's always a simple explanation for anything that looks too complicated for an old game to do.
Pizza Tycoon was one of those games we got years later for £5 in some repackaged "Classic Games" collection but it came without a booklet or anything.
Supposedly the booklet was the key to getting the pizzas right as it had all the instructions on which elements were needed & where. (I heard someone say they used this as an antipiracy thing as without the booklet, it'd be playable but impossible, not sure if that's true lol)
We used to just cargo cult our way to good pizzas.
The way it worked was you had to offer at least a few pizzas that were reasonably close to recipes from the booklet in order to get any customers. Once you had that, you could get creative with custom recipes but if you only did custom recipes, you were bound to fail.
Pizza Tycoon was the US market name, internationally it was released as Pizza Connection
is that much of anything for a 25MHz CPU? We're talking about something cycling 25 million times per second, surely that's not such a big deal for a 386?
Being able to do millions of things each second should enable all sorts of behaviors, especially for a game of the era when you asked the OS to kindly step aside while you run your program.
totally! I was also wondering this. I know each operation takes some number of cycles, but there's still 25,000,000 of them happening per second, and there's no multi-tasking... :shrug: :)
Then you could take advantage of the deep simulation capability, not worring about traffic and things like that - for your Bookstore Tycoon or Donut Tycoon franchise.
Have you considered doing one? ^_^
If you want a less-restrictive game dev system or can't afford the (well worth it!) $15 for Pico-8, there are many great free methods, like LÖVE (also uses Lua), Godot (GDScript or C#), Phaser (js), and so on.
As to why I did this; when I had some time between university and starting a job many years ago I was looking for a hobby coding project and was inspired by TTDPatch and OpenTTD so I figured I'd do the same but for Pizza Tycoon. No specific reason other than that I played the game a lot as a teenager and there were some small things that I found annoying, so I saw some room for quality of life improvements. Fully aware that not many people care about this game (also didn't really expect to really get very far tbh), but still I had (and have) a lot of fun and learned a lot in the process of writing a modern engine for this.
Good luck! It's not always about the destination :P
anyways i've been looking for offline, open source games so thanks for sharing.
edit: actually if it hits an end of a road, it spawns to a lane next to it either goes opposite direction or turns (referencing first gif)
Wonder if they could have considered ensuring no cars stack on top of each other
Same principle applies to on-chain computation: gas costs force you to find closed-form solutions. For example, computing φⁿ (golden ratio to the power n) naively requires n multiplications. Using the matrix identity [[1,1],[1,0]]^n via repeated squaring gives you O(log n) — and the Fibonacci numbers fall out for free. The old game devs would have appreciated EVM constraints.