mariuzThe gold standard of optimization: A look under the hood of RollerCoaster Tycoon
I had always heard about how RCT was built in Assembly, and thought it was very impressive.
The more I actually started digging into assembly, the more this task seems monumental and impossible.
I didn't know there was a fork and I'm excited to look into it
Macros. Lots of macros.
Fun read, thx! I'd also recommend more about RCT:
"Interview with RollerCoaster Tycoon's Creator, Chris Sawyer (2024)" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46130335
"Rollercoaster Tycoon (Or, MicroProse's Last Hurrah)" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44758842
"RollerCoaster Tycoon at 25: 'It's mind-blowing how it inspired me'" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39792034
"RollerCoaster Tycoon was the last of its kind [video]" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42346463
"The Story of RollerCoaster Tycoon" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ts4BD8AqD9g
What language is this article talking where compilers don't optimize multiplication and division by powers of two? Even for division of signed integers, current compilers emit inline code that handles positive and negative values separately, still avoiding the division instruction (unless when optimizing for size, of course).
> Imagine a programmer asking a game designer if they could change their formula to use an 8 instead of a 9.5 because it is a number that the CPU prefers to calculate with. There is a very good argument to be made that a game designer should never have to worry about the runtime performance characteristics of binary arithmetic in their life, that’s a fate reserved for programmers
Numeric characteristics are absolutely still a consideration for game designers even in 2026, one that influences what numbers they use in their game designs. The good ones, anyways. There are, of course, also countless bad developers/designers who ignore these things these days, but not because it is free to do so; rather, because they don't know better, and in many cases it is one of many silent contributing factors to a noticeable decrease in the quality of their game.
Examples?
Absolutely. I have written a small but growing CAD kernel which is seeing use in some games and realtime visualization tools ( https://github.com/timschmidt/csgrs ) and can say that computing with numbers isn't really even a solved problem yet.
All possible numerical representations come with inherent trade-offs around speed, accuracy, storage size, complexity, and even the kinds of questions one can ask (it's often not meaningful to ask if two floats equal each other without an epsilon to account for floating point error, for instance.
Toward an API for the Real numbers ( https://dl.acm.org/doi/epdf/10.1145/3385412.3386037 ) is one of the better papers I've found detailing a sort of staged complexity technique for dealing with this, in which most calculations are fast and always return, but one can still ask for more precise answers which require more compute if required. But there are also other options entirely like interval arithmetic, etc.
One must understand the trade-offs else be bitten by them.