I couldn't understand why someone would want to reimplement Pizza Tycoon, until I realized I played it's sequel as a child, which is much maligned compared to the original.
How Pizza Tycoon simulated traffic on a 25 MHz CPU
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Re: How Pizza Tycoon simulated traffic on a 25 MHz CPU
#12Anyone know of any communities/game jams with the theme of "has no business running on such low hardware requirements"? Kind of like the demoscene but for games. 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).
+1 This needs to exist if it doesn't yet! 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 a…
Yeah, I imagine a target emulator is the way to go for this kind of thing.
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.
Re: How Pizza Tycoon simulated traffic on a 25 MHz CPU
#13My high school girlfriend and I played this game all the time; trying to build the pizzas to get the best score was always super frustrating. It always felt like I could be a single pixel off and get a really low score, but I loved building my "empire"
> My high school girlfriend and I played this game all the time; trying to build the pizzas to get the best score was always super frustrating. It always felt like I could be a single pixel off
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.
Re: How Pizza Tycoon simulated traffic on a 25 MHz CPU
#14Earlier quoted context omitted.
+1 This needs to exist if it doesn't yet! 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 a…
Yeah, I imagine a target emulator is the way to go for this kind of thing. 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.
That made me somewhat disappointed back in the day too, when I realized that some games had extra sound circuitry or even an extra CPU in them.
Re: How Pizza Tycoon simulated traffic on a 25 MHz CPU
#15Anyone know of any communities/game jams with the theme of "has no business running on such low hardware requirements"? Kind of like the demoscene but for games. 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).
+1 This needs to exist if it doesn't yet! 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 a…
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Re: How Pizza Tycoon simulated traffic on a 25 MHz CPU
#16The third image showing the arrows for traffic direction gave me a tiny eureka moment. You don't need complex rules for what cars can do at an intersection. You don't reason about the intersection at all. You reason about the lanes ! 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"…
Someone hasn't been watching their Biffa!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pGCoLh3NL7g
It's all about the lanes and the flow.
Re: How Pizza Tycoon simulated traffic on a 25 MHz CPU
#17Anyone know of any communities/game jams with the theme of "has no business running on such low hardware requirements"? Kind of like the demoscene but for games. 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).
+1 This needs to exist if it doesn't yet! 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 a…
>Some Fantasy Consoles sort of count here?
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.
Re: How Pizza Tycoon simulated traffic on a 25 MHz CPU
#18I couldn't understand why someone would want to reimplement Pizza Tycoon, until I realized I played it's sequel as a child, which is much maligned compared to the original.
I tried the sequels and they never clicked for me either. Probably also due to the missing nostalgia factor :)
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.
Re: How Pizza Tycoon simulated traffic on a 25 MHz CPU
#19My high school girlfriend and I played this game all the time; trying to build the pizzas to get the best score was always super frustrating. It always felt like I could be a single pixel off and get a really low score, but I loved building my "empire"
> My high school girlfriend and I played this game all the time; trying to build the pizzas to get the best score was always super frustrating. It always felt like I could be a single pixel off 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 al…
That's true! In the original if you don't have at least 3 of the pizza recipes from the "cook book" that shipped with the game your restaurant popularity stat gets divided by 8, which makes it really difficult to make any profit :)
Re: How Pizza Tycoon simulated traffic on a 25 MHz CPU
#20The third image showing the arrows for traffic direction gave me a tiny eureka moment. You don't need complex rules for what cars can do at an intersection. You don't reason about the intersection at all. You reason about the lanes ! 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"…
Someone hasn't been watching their Biffa! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pGCoLh3NL7g It's all about the lanes and the flow.
Had no idea about this channel. 100% down my alley. Thanks for sharing!