Interesting article! You should cross-post to some retro gaming communities, I'm sure they'd love it. I still never okayed this game as it came out when there was too much heat in Sims in the 90s, but probably would have enjoyed it more than some of the sim games I did play.
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If you are into game optimization tricks you might like this video: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=lC4YLMLar5I&pp=ygUhdGhlIGdhbWUgdGhhdCBjb3VsZG4ndCBiZSB3cml0dGVu
It's about the original Elite, and all tricks needed to create a full virtual galaxy on 8 bit computers
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It is actually very interesting to see what your code actually causes on the CPU. Nowadays you have quite large instruction sets which help you with many operations what were manual in the past. But even then, you at this point you start counting CPU cycles. Back then, a multiplication by 4, written in C, probably resulted in using 4 CPU cycles of additions, instead of just shifting the bits 2 places left in one cycle. So you just saved 3 cycles. Sounds like nothing, but with only one core at 33MHz and hundreds of such calculations, it will have a much larger impact.
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I dunno, I'm sort of underwhelmed.
- use the smallest data type you need for a given purpose (which you don't really need to worry about on modern hardware for integer types)
- use bitwise arithmetic when possible
- use fake pathfinding when possible (in this case random walk), and when not possible, limit search depth
- don't do collision detection on thousands of guests; allow them to phase through each other
This is all fairly basic stuff I would hope any game dev would be aware of.
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I want to optimize MR BONES WILD RIDE
RCT made my night classes in 2003 tolerable.
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