Decompiling Fast Food Tycoon 2: Drawing the World
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Interesting that the Pizza scoring rules are that simple. I remember that the in-game encyclopedia said something that kids and teens prefer big portion sizes. This led me to always create a Pizza that just had an entire fried chicken on it, as it was easy to reproduce, made a lot of money (big ingredient costs = big margins), and gave good ratings.
And I definitely noticed that Pizzas covered with an even tomato sauce did better than blank ones, probably from the symmetry rules. I just assumed it was hardcoded that people do not like naked pizza.
Interesting note for the translation: The game is German and they went deeply into the whimsy, e.g. most of the demographic groups had funny and very colloquial names. It seems they translated "Grufties" with "Goths". Which makes sense considering the real meaning of Grufti in German (members of the Goth subculture), but in the game the term was actually used as funny way to refer to old senior people (people almost in a "Gruft" = "crypt"). So it's obviously a mistranslation, pulling the word straight from the dictionary. Maybe "Cryptid" would have been more fitting. :D
Of course, I might be wrong.
> the named animation sequence
noone abused verbs like this in the before times. a named animation sequence?? as opposed to what, ephemeral anonymous animation sequences?
Maybe it's a bit stuffy or formal, but yes, "the named sequence" is 100% something a real English speaking human would write. And if it's a sequence of frames forming an animation, it can absolutely be a named animation sequence.
And in this context, literally yes that's what it sounds like. The .ani file can contain multiple animation sequences that each have a name.
> Anything that moves is stored in an .ani file which is a sprite sheet and named animation sequences.
This is how I found most of my favorite PC games as well, including this one.
Often there were these vertical mesh cylinders with a very low effort sign stuck in them that just read the price and that was it. You had to dig through layers upon layers of arbitrary games and surprisingly often found real gems.
It was an eye-opener for tween me to realize that some of the best games made in that era were about as popular as some of the worst games from the same era.
Thank you for the article, a really fascinating read! Good start to my morning.
A few years ago there was mathematics progress in recommendation algorithms. Those could better things a lot. I foolishly disparaged the progress, as yet another way to sell us more content. I'm sorry for that. I've changed my mind since.
I think some people are brute forcing it through a lot of agent time and expense, but they used 6.1 Sol Medium, a great but not a top capability AI model+effort.
This matches what I've been hearing regarding talent and experience making a big difference in task speed and cost when using AI. When prices stop being subsidized, this will be a key factor when evaluating engineer performance: "you've used a lot of tokens and don't have much to show for!"
Who knows where this is going to end, but Talent+AI still beats Vibe work by a lot.
Ultimately it feels pretty similar to using lines of code as a measure.
Instead I recommend setting a budget per head and evaluating performance traditionally, allowing for exceptions in exceptional circumstances of course.
A simple "/goal analyze this codebase, assign names for each function, and creates named structs for parameters." works well, even with quite weak agents. Remember, parsing through heaps of text is their forte!
This setup also works for more exotic non-x86 architectures with more dynamic code loading, like PS2, N64, etc.
That said, I too miss this game and think about it sometimes still decades later. It had a beautiful world, great mechanics, many interesting quirks and things to learn over time, and even cheats (you could 'punish' your gang members until their health bars were empty and then they became invincible!). Nice to see the artwork again and to learn how it was made and finally understand the Pizza rating!
One of the best features of the game was though the handbook - it came with a pizza recipe and motivated me and probably many other teen boys to take their first baking steps.
Thank you to the author and even more to the artists that made this cool game. Wish there was something like this again today.
> Pizza Tycoon (Pizza Connection) was followed by Fast Food Tycoon (Pizza Syndicate), and Fast Food Tycoon 2 (Pizza Connection 2),[8] developed by Software 2000. A fourth game, Pizza Connection 3 was developed by Gentlymad Studios in 2018.
> Pizza Connection 1 & 2 were released on GOG.com in January 2017.[9]
> In March 2026, Pizza Legacy, an open-source reimplementation of the Pizza Tycoon engine, was released for modern operating systems.[10]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pizza_Tycoon
Hopefully it gives more people a creative kick and we see a revival of more games inspired by some of those game mechanism and potentially even move away from using the well-known set of engines to build games with.
But all of them need one step, free assets under Creative Commons or similar licenses).
I remember the big change of OpenTTD when it became finally all free software.
I wish to know Blender3D to help this projects, but I am a regular IT guy.
To my knowledge this is a recreation in Unity, not a decompile, and it was done without AI assistance as it was the goal of the developer to learn Unity.
>Fast Food Tycoon 2. There's a very good chance that you have not heard of this oddball 2001 business simulator
nope, never hear of
>I actually call this game Pizza Connection 2 because that's the European name!
ah yes, I played that at a friends house!
> Goths stay home until 09:00.
- wanna see a post of people experimenting with all the models and do a write up on it.
- if nobody writes such a post, i will. i am in the process of decompiling multiple games