tokumaru wrote:
You mentioned a lot of figures and how each of one thing occupies so many bytes and how many of them there are and so on, but you never mentioned compression.
I did mention compression. For example, each acre and each room can be RLE'd down, but we can't set a cap on the size of each room unless we set a cap on the number of items in the room. The "list of ID's, coordinates and parameters" for each room would take 96 bytes, comprising 32 (x:4, y:4, id:16) tuples. Using this same data format outside might leave players scratching their heads as to why things disappear when dropped outside. I could assign shorter codes to more common items to be found outside (tree, rock, fruit). But then getting hit in Sonic for Sega Master System or Somari for NES already spits fewer rings than in the Sonic games for Genesis.
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Does the original game use any?
The GameCube and DS games use an 8-bit character encoding, which could be considered compression compared to the UTF-16 representation that games for some bigger systems use. LZ doesn't work on such small strings because there isn't repetition. Huffman with a static table might work.
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Can't you have smaller letters
To an extent. The GameCube and DS games cap the length of each letter with a meter represented as "ink". I'll revise my AC analysis to cut the amount of "ink", especially considering Huffman coding.
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or carry less of them?
That could be cut in half, but each of 8 neighbors carries only one.
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You mentioned maps with two layers. Is the switching between the two layers so present in the whole map that you really need the second layer?
Not really, It just allows, say, a table lamp on top of an end table.
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Can't you invent a special way to overlay smaller maps only over the areas that actually need a second layer?
Only the indoor areas need a second layer, and I'm taking them down to 96 bytes anyway with the RLE.
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I'd not be looking at how it was done, but I would be thinking about how I would do it, just from what I know from playing it. Features will be lost? Certainly!
I'm trying to analyze which features would be the first on the cutting room floor.
On a whim, I tried your approach of specifically defining things that I'm sure I want to keep, and we're still over 8192 bytes.