Comments on: Explorer: 3 – Room Data

By: Explorer: 5 – Walls Again « Tummai Games

Explorer: 5 – Walls Again « Tummai Games — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 14:30:46 +0000

[...] my first post about Explorer’s room data format, I said that I used 4 bytes to store the wall/gap information for each room. After some thinking, I [...]

By: Explorer: 4 – Inner Room Data « Tummai Games

Explorer: 4 – Inner Room Data « Tummai Games — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 14:18:41 +0000

[...] Tummai Games development blog for NES games « Explorer: 3 – Room Data [...]

By: Rob

Rob — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 16:27:04 +0000

Wow, after seeing the numbers like that, it _is_ great savings indeed. Nice way to capitalize on it by using two different tables (N/S and E/W)! Keep up the outstanding work : D

By: Thomas

Thomas — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 07:59:18 +0000

@Rob: That’s a really good idea about the wall data redundancy! I worked it out on paper today and discovered I could get greater than 50% savings by doing what you suggested.

It doesn’t look like it will be difficult to implement either. I’m going to have two tables: one for East-West walls and one for North-South walls. Having the two directions separated makes it easier to find an index based on floor (x,y) coordinates.

The savings are huge. On a 3×3 (9 room) floor, using the old 4-byte per room method I’d need 36 bytes. But with the new method I’ll only need 12. And for other sizes:

4×4: old = 64 bytes, new = 24 bytes
5×5: old = 100 bytes, new = 40 bytes
10×10: old = 400 bytes, new = 180 bytes
20×20: old = 1600 bytes, new = 760 bytes

I’m going to change it over ASAP! Thanks a lot!

By: Rob

Rob — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 18:40:30 +0000

Hey, I like the idea of the base template room. I could probably use something like that in !Clik!. There are no openings for each level, but maybe I could have a smaller map for each section (base room for level 1, smaller inside map for 1-1, smaller inside map for 1-2, etc.) Nifty!

About the data redundancy deal, I’m not quite sure how this could be approached off the top of my head, but what about making a separate map? For instance, I would guess that you have an overall table map that describes what room is what:

.db $30,$31,$20

or whatever. What if there was a second map, but it was a mapping of the openings?

.db %00100100, %00011000, %00011000, %00011000

So when you go into whatever room, read from that offset and subtract/add to get to be able to get all four sides maybe? I don’t know, that’s the best I could come up with off-the-cuff haha