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How Pizza Tycoon simulated traffic on a 25 MHz CPU

pizzalegacy.nl

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Re: How Pizza Tycoon simulated traffic on a 25 MHz CPU

#61

Post by joemi »

hilti wrote: post #36

I love these posts, because I always wanted to get into game development and never found spare time. Thank you so much!

It's been mentioned a few other places in the comments here, but I recommend PICO-8 for beginning game developers. It's a really well-designed fantasy console, so it feels like you're actually developing for specific hardware due to the limits. But you're programming in Lua with an easy-to-use API, and you can make the entire game using PICO-8, since it has a code editor, sprite editor, map editor, sound fx editor, and music editor. It's a really nice experience -- I think this is the primary reason people love it and you hear so much about it.

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.

Re: How Pizza Tycoon simulated traffic on a 25 MHz CPU

#62

Post by jasomill »

lencastre wrote: post #44
edwcross wrote: post #23

Great! I'll finally be able to buy all commerce spots in Berlin (cheapest city) to avoid any competition, and _then_ open a restaurant. 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…

the most profitable pizza, pizza base + one (literally one) piece of minced tomato, yes you read that right, one “nico” of tomato 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…

This reminds me of the old joke from Annie Hall,

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."

Re: How Pizza Tycoon simulated traffic on a 25 MHz CPU

#63

Post by Cthulhu_ »

setr wrote: post #29

By making the roads single-direction and roads owning the movement, I think it’s been made equivalent to a conveyer belt… which means factorio’s conveyor belt optimizations might be relevant. 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 https://www.factorio.com…

Factorio is such a great example of how different the visuals can be from the underlying datastructure. Conveyor belts look hugely complex / heavyweight - if you consider them as individual items each with an x/y position that needs to be updated every tick. But if you see them as a linked list with only a distance and it becomes a lot simpler.

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.

Re: How Pizza Tycoon simulated traffic on a 25 MHz CPU

#64

Post by busfahrer »

BeetleB wrote: post #46
Waterluvian wrote: post #5

Anyone 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).

Frontier Elite (David Braben). A vast universe, with awesome space flight mechanics (gravity, etc), great graphics/audio, all fitting on one floppy disk. It was coded in assembly: 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 so…

Even more impressively than fitting on a single floppy disk, Elite was built to fit into 56 kb of RAM

Re: How Pizza Tycoon simulated traffic on a 25 MHz CPU

#65

Post by BeetleB »

busfahrer wrote: post #64
BeetleB wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Frontier Elite (David Braben). A vast universe, with awesome space flight mechanics (gravity, etc), great graphics/audio, all fitting on one floppy disk. It was coded in assembly: 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 so…

Even more impressively than fitting on a single floppy disk, Elite was built to fit into 56 kb of RAM

That's the original Elite. I'm referring to one of the sequels.

Re: How Pizza Tycoon simulated traffic on a 25 MHz CPU

#66

Post by [deleted] »

hadlock wrote: post #48
lencastre wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the most profitable pizza, pizza base + one (literally one) piece of minced tomato, yes you read that right, one “nico” of tomato 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…

I'm pretty sure you just described Little Caesar's Pizza business model. I recall way back they were $5 but even today here in California their large pepperoni is only $10 where competitors are charging $27-35

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