[LOOM] Loom - A Mystical Adventure Game

Post by **kv83** » Sun 28 May, 2006 5:42 pm

Have you thought about compression?

gangsta · Post by **gangsta** » Mon 29 May, 2006 1:06 am

gj on getting it featured. this is a great project, and it is progressing quickly.

Post by **L4E_WakaMol-King** » Mon 29 May, 2006 2:25 am

How does compression work?

I'm sure it slows things down, so I probably won't do it for Bobbin's sprite, but perhaps for the pictures.

Post by **tr1p1ea** » Mon 29 May, 2006 4:35 am

Compression can be tricky, depending on your implementation.

The simplest method is probably RLE, you can find some info about it here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Run-length_encoding

Post by **L4E_WakaMol-King** » Mon 29 May, 2006 5:25 am

Thanks tr1p1ea

Yeah, that wouldn't save me much room with the sprites... but it would make a big difference with the pictures.

Mike K · Post by **Mike K** » Mon 29 May, 2006 5:40 pm

Lots of whitespace... that is a goldmine for RLE.

-Mike

Post by **L4E_WakaMol-King** » Mon 29 May, 2006 8:05 pm

Well, these is a fair amount of white space in the sprites, but it's not adjacent whitespace. There is rarely a run of more than 8 blank or black pixils. In fact, for some of the sprites, RLE might even increase the sprite size.

I will take a look at it and see if it helps... but I think that once I add in the encoder and decoder, the net amount of space saved will not be very much for the sprites.

Post by **L4E_WakaMol-King** » Tue 06 Jun, 2006 9:28 pm

Hey everyone

Sorry I haven't posted in so long. If you've been watching the Programming Help forum, you know why.

Anyway, I got that really nasty and illusive bug worked out in the end, thanks to Jim e. I've also been thinking a lot about whether or not I am going to keep making this for ION. In the end, I've decided to leave it as ION. As planned, I will port it to Mirage and other popular shells once it is done, but Ion has always been my favorite shell, so I've decided to stick with it.

In other news, it may be a while before my next update. The program is getting too big, so I am having to move all the spites and maps to a seperate data file. That's going to take a long time I'm afraid. I will probably rewrite a couple of my sprite handling routines to make them more efficient also. So while I will still be doing a lot of work on the game, there won't be anything new to show you for a while.

However, I am about half way done with the spell casting code, so when new stuff starts coming out, that will be the first.

Post by **L4E_WakaMol-King** » Thu 08 Jun, 2006 6:09 am

I was expecting the transfer of all my sprites and maps to a second data file to be a long painful process, but it's actually going rather smoothly. It's so weird to see my program size getting smaller. It's down to 6.3 k and will probably be down to 4.5 k by the time I'm finished. That should leave me plenty of room for the rest of the game code. It should also allow me to finish the game in Ion.

(This is my third post in a row... If this is considered spam, I can hold off on updates and only post important stuff. Just let me know.)

Post by **kv83** » Thu 08 Jun, 2006 8:12 am

No. An update is not considered as spam

I'm reading it all btw, and I am very intrested in your progress.

Good job on the splitting!

CompWiz · Post by **CompWiz** » Thu 08 Jun, 2006 8:43 am

L4E_WakaMol-King wrote:I was expecting the transfer of all my sprites and maps to a second data file to be a long painful process, but it's actually going rather smoothly. It's so weird to see my program size getting smaller. It's down to 6.3 k and will probably be down to 4.5 k by the time I'm finished. That should leave me plenty of room for the rest of the game code. It should also allow me to finish the game in Ion.

(This is my third post in a row... If this is considered spam, I can hold off on updates and only post important stuff. Just let me know.)

that's great. I'm always amazed by the rate at which your projects progress.

Post by **tr1p1ea** » Thu 08 Jun, 2006 2:48 pm

Yeah, this is probably one of the most active projects around ... somehting that i think we all miss.

Splitting up your program is a good idea, i can see this having a lot of text and graphics data.

NanoWar · Post by **NanoWar** » Thu 08 Jun, 2006 5:25 pm

To ask again:
Have you thought of switching to an application?

CompWiz · Post by **CompWiz** » Thu 08 Jun, 2006 7:12 pm

NanoWar wrote:To ask again:
Have you thought of switching to an application?

switching to an application would most likely waste a lot of space on the archive. What's wrong with using two files? A lot of programs do this, and it tends to work very well. As long as he can fit the data in one program, and the code in the other, then he's all set, no app needed.

Jim e · Post by **Jim e** » Thu 08 Jun, 2006 7:45 pm

CompWiz wrote:
NanoWar wrote:To ask again:
Have you thought of switching to an application?
switching to an application would most likely waste a lot of space on the archive. What's wrong with using two files? A lot of programs do this, and it tends to work very well. As long as he can fit the data in one program, and the code in the other, then he's all set, no app needed.

From what I saw last, WakaMol didn't code anything that would fucntion outside of the memory constraints of the ram. Creating a seperate program uses extra ram for its entry in the VAT. Now if he codes it to read only nesscary data from the flash this can exceed ram constraints.

There are a few benefits to an app over reading from a DATA file.
1) Apps can exceeds the 64k file limit without using external files.
2) Using an external file requires you to access data in it relatively, in apps related code and data can be placed on the same page and accessed more quickly and absolutely.
3) To grab data in an archived file, you must have a buffer in the ram for it. Meaning you must allocate ram equal to the largest block needed.(unless of course it can fit it one of the saferams)
4) All programs that reside in the archive will result in a garbage collect(yes even crunchy os with its patching splendor), Apps never will.
5) No shell dependancies