Where is the interview? Link is about history of Chris Sawyer's works but doesn't actually contain an interview. Still fascinating though, really enjoyed his games.
Transport Tycoon a.k.a. the great optimiser, Chris Sawyer
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Re: Transport Tycoon a.k.a. the great optimiser, Chris Sawyer
#12It still boggles my mind that Chris Sawyer wrote Roller Coaster Tycoon was written in pure assembly, only failing back to C to handle windows sound apis. The game is a masterpiece, it defined an entire game genre for decades. And RCT ran smooth on my pentium 2 400mhz processor, even with hundreds of guests and dozens of rides. I believe there are many magnitudes of performance hiding in poor software abstractions in…
It ran smooth on a Pentiuk MMX 200 MHz with 32 MB of RAM. A Pentium II 400 MHz computer might as well have been a Cray to me at the time!
Re: Transport Tycoon a.k.a. the great optimiser, Chris Sawyer
#13It still boggles my mind that Chris Sawyer wrote Roller Coaster Tycoon was written in pure assembly, only failing back to C to handle windows sound apis. The game is a masterpiece, it defined an entire game genre for decades. And RCT ran smooth on my pentium 2 400mhz processor, even with hundreds of guests and dozens of rides. I believe there are many magnitudes of performance hiding in poor software abstractions in…
What I'd really love to know is how the game was ported to Android/iOS recently, because as far as I can tell the game is literally a 1:1 copy, so I wonder if they wrote some kind of x86 assembly interpreter for it? I cannot imagine they just remade the game in some other engine and achieved this level of accuracy.
Re: Transport Tycoon a.k.a. the great optimiser, Chris Sawyer
#14Chris if you are reading this, thank you for one of the most memorable economic simulations ever produced. I later designed a major crypto exchange and am currently running a robotics venture seeking to create a fully autonomous food retail network. I can probably track my operations research interest to Transport Tycoon, which I pirated from a local computer shop at about age 11. PS. Soundtrack was also genius!
Re: Transport Tycoon a.k.a. the great optimiser, Chris Sawyer
#15Where is the interview? Link is about history of Chris Sawyer's works but doesn't actually contain an interview. Still fascinating though, really enjoyed his games.
It's an audio interview, right at the very top of the article.
Re: Transport Tycoon a.k.a. the great optimiser, Chris Sawyer
#16Re: Transport Tycoon a.k.a. the great optimiser, Chris Sawyer
#17Re: Transport Tycoon a.k.a. the great optimiser, Chris Sawyer
#18I played Roller Coaster Tycoon for months and months and months as a kid, and still have an installation of OpenTTD on my machine for an relaxed evening. But RCT is his masterpiece. I remember being shocked as a teenager when I learned that the game I thought was the work of at least a dozen people was written by a singly guy in assembly.
Re: Transport Tycoon a.k.a. the great optimiser, Chris Sawyer
#19Transport Tycoon was the first game I remember playing. What a great game.
The first computer I was on played it so slowly that trains would jump around like a slideshow. That was normal. When we upgraded and they ran smoothly it was mind blowing.
Re: Transport Tycoon a.k.a. the great optimiser, Chris Sawyer
#20Should be noted that it is an iteration of Sid Meier's Railroad Tycoon, released 4 years prior.