Technology

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.

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.

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

This was posted a few weeks ago already?