Since I'm not sure whether the way I intend to store the level data for my next game is efficient enough, I wanted to ask whether there is any known information of specific games and the way they store their levels.
Since my game will be a top-down, screen-by-screen-scrolling game, "The Legend of Zelda" seems to be the most straightforward example for comparison:
How is, for example, the overworld stored in ROM? Do they save two bytes (x/y and meta tile) for each and every 16 x 16 tile on the screen or do they have other ways of doing this?
I assume they don't save 16 x 11 bytes for every screen to store every 16 x 16 area uncompressed.
Also, the color values: Do they save the whole palette indices for each screen separately (i.e. in case the programmer changes the position of an object, he also has to remember to change the palette data)? Or do they actually generate the colors from the meta tiles (like in: At position 7,4 there is a tree, so we write the palette index for a tree into the memory location that corresponds with the location of the tree tiles.)
Since my game will be a top-down, screen-by-screen-scrolling game, "The Legend of Zelda" seems to be the most straightforward example for comparison:
How is, for example, the overworld stored in ROM? Do they save two bytes (x/y and meta tile) for each and every 16 x 16 tile on the screen or do they have other ways of doing this?
I assume they don't save 16 x 11 bytes for every screen to store every 16 x 16 area uncompressed.
Also, the color values: Do they save the whole palette indices for each screen separately (i.e. in case the programmer changes the position of an object, he also has to remember to change the palette data)? Or do they actually generate the colors from the meta tiles (like in: At position 7,4 there is a tree, so we write the palette index for a tree into the memory location that corresponds with the location of the tree tiles.)