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Posted by FinnKuhn 6 hours ago

How Pizza Tycoon simulated traffic on a 25 MHz CPU(pizzalegacy.nl)
238 points | 48 comments
Neywiny 2 minutes ago|
I would argue it's not that you don't need pathfinding because the roads tell the cars where to go, it's because the cars aren't trying to get anywhere. Unlike cities skylines and co where a car is going from a place to a place, random directions at intersections are dramatically simpler. Which isn't necessarily worse, it's just a different problem.
edwcross 4 hours ago||
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 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.

cowomaly 4 hours ago||
I'm writing the engine from scratch (not re-creating the original engine) so it definitely won't have the original bug. Of course I'll have my own bugs but at least its open source now so it's fixable by more people :D
ErroneousBosh 23 minutes ago||
> Of course I'll have my own bugs...

... but they'll be just as entertaining?

lencastre 2 hours ago||
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 ice cream anymore

hadlock 1 hour ago||
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
setr 4 hours ago||
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/blog/post/fff-176

mjamesaustin 3 hours ago|
The distance is not static because of cars stopping for one another.
setr 1 hour ago||
That’s the compression, same story in factorio. Before/after compression it’s static, so you can avoid having to update any value.

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)

Waterluvian 5 hours ago||
The 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" on turning.

bombcar 5 hours ago|
Someone hasn't been watching their Biffa!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pGCoLh3NL7g

It's all about the lanes and the flow.

Waterluvian 5 hours ago||
Had no idea about this channel. 100% down my alley. Thanks for sharing!
bombcar 3 hours ago||
It's amazing how "bad/inaccurate" the traffic simulators are in those games, even with great mods, and yet how informative they are about real traffic patterns.
Waterluvian 5 hours ago||
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).

BeetleB 1 hour ago||
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 sophisticated and smooth.

whizzter 5 hours ago|||
Not entirely sure if it's fit the critera but there is usually pops up retro-themed compos for most retro platforms meaning there's natural hardware restrictions (like demos for retro platforms).

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).

Night_Thastus 2 hours ago|||
'Micro Mages': https://morphcat.de/micromages/

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!

nosrepa 1 hour ago|||
I've been enjoying seeing how far people have been pushing the Playdate's hardware.
andai 5 hours ago|||
+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 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 ;)

GoofGarage 5 hours ago|||
>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.

Waterluvian 5 hours ago|||
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.

actionfromafar 5 hours ago||
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.
dec0dedab0de 4 hours ago|||
Wolfenstein 3D would have to be on that list.
Narishma 5 hours ago||
Demo parties usually have a category for games.
bluedino 5 hours ago||
> cars don't need to know where they're going. Each road tile type carries its own direction. Road tile 0x16 is the bottom part of a horizontal road, meaning that cars can only drive from left to right on these roads.

There's always a simple explanation for anything that looks too complicated for an old game to do.

manofmanysmiles 3 hours ago||
I love that this has been in development for so long. It's a breath of fresh air in this manic vibe coding era, and a reminder to me that I can slow down.
dpcx 6 hours ago||
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 and get a really low score, but I loved building my "empire"
another-dave 5 hours ago|
> 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.

cowomaly 5 hours ago|||
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 :)
silvester23 5 hours ago||||
The thing about the anti-piracy is true, at least in the original version (I don't know about re-releases).

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.

swores 4 hours ago||
To be fair, I suspect real life is a bit like that too - there will be a big enough % of potential customers who want one of "the classics" for where you are (margherita etc in Italy, pepperoni etc in the UK, whatever) that basically every place that serves pizza will have the same first few options even if they get creative with the rest of the menu.
dec0dedab0de 4 hours ago|||
When I was a kid I manually made it through the cliffs of logic in KingsQuest VI by trial and error and taking notes for days, before I realized the answer was in the book. Almost did the same thing for translating hieroglyphics the Dagger of Amon Ra, but I remembered what happened before and went to check.
IrishTechie 6 hours ago||
I was looking for this game on GOG only an hour ago having regaled a teenager with how great it was! It’s not on GOG unfortunately.
haunter 6 hours ago|
It’s on GOG and Steam.

Pizza Tycoon was the US market name, internationally it was released as Pizza Connection

https://www.gog.com/en/game/pizza_connection

https://store.steampowered.com/app/598990/Pizza_Connection/

mcraiha 4 hours ago||
At least in Finland it was also Pizza Tycoon https://www.pelit.fi/artikkelit/pizza-tycoon-2/
cowomaly 2 hours ago||
Yeah the DOS version was called Pizza Tycoon everywhere. The Amiga version was in German and was called Pizza Connection. Only for the digital re-release in 2017 did they go with Pizza Connection, but all the assets of the DOS version (including that re-release) call it Pizza Tycoon.
dueltmp_yufsy 2 hours ago|
"an open-source reimplementation of the 1994 DOS game" I love that communities band together to keep these things alive and even thrive beyond the original.
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