Things I've done today

[davidn]

• Drew quite a lot of this stuff:
  


• Wrote procedures to save a compressed level format - instead of saving every value, it does what CDs do and saves them as strings of identical tiles - this can cause massive savings on blank spaces, which are recorded not as 208,992 zeroes but as "[repeat tile 0 208,992 times]"


• Realized that this method of loading was much slower - about four of five seconds a room, which wasn't crippling but was annoying


• Worked on improving the loading procedure as well, so that it completely skipped over stretches of blank tiles, calculating where it should land in the level array rather than stepping through (240000*SaveZ( "SaveVars" )+600*SaveY( "SaveVars" )+SaveX( "SaveVars" ) + Gap, then translated back into coordinates)


• Thanks to that, got even quite large rooms to load instantly!


• Realized that one day's work of patching up all of the above later, I'm now exactly where I started the day, except with level files that take up 2-4KB instead of 2MB. This could have been quite important in 1997

Still, I like the cave texture.

Comments

[rakarr.livejournal.com]

I think having level files that are 2-4KB instead of 2MB is fantastically worthwhile. We might, by and large, have so much space and internet speed that 2mb doesn't seem like much, but 2kb is still a thousand times smaller, and any improvement in size and loading efficiency is absolutely worthwhile. If more game developers bothered with that we might not need 3TB hard drives and huge amounts of memory. So, bravo. I'll definitely be asking your advice on efficiency if I ever make a game.

And I like the cave texture too!