How Pizza Tycoon simulated traffic on a 25 MHz CPU

https://pizzalegacy.nl/blog/traffic-system.html

How Pizza Tycoon simulated traffic on a 25 MHz CPU — Pizza Legacy Blog

Reverse engineering the traffic system from Pizza Tycoon (1994): how the original devs drove dozens of cars through a city with almost no CPU budget.

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.

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