Ice Fighters

Contests 4K Game Competition - 2009
#21

[quote=“h3ckboy,post:20,topic:32821”]
I like it without a mini-map cause then it adds a maze effect to the game.
/quote]

Hmmm, good point. It would sort of give the game away particularly on the second level. I did toy with just showing what the user had seen, but again I ran out of bytes.

Yes, it’s complex, but it was the only way I could find to compress the wall data down enough to fit! I’m definitely open to better ideas.

Thanks for the compliment! :smiley: I might extended it. There’s a lot of really cool things I wanted to do like bosses, different weapons, transparent walls and so on, and most of them actually won’t require much work (or bytes!)

#22

If rather than encoding the end co-ord you encode the length then the data should compress a lot better (especially if you’re clever in the way you order it) and you’ll probably only need a few extra bytes for decoding.

#23

I must confess I didn’t think of encoding by length rather than endpoint. But I’m curious why you think it would compress better – most of the rooms are different sizes and unless the rooms were square I don’t see why one scheme would offer a better compression ratio than the other. A lot of points are re-used in a maze (eg point 127 is used in all mazes) so compression should be reasonable from the points currently.

Also, storing the lengths would mean that you’d need to cater for positive and negative numbers, thus halving the distance you could move in a single byte. For example a wall from 0,0 to 0, 127 could not be represented in a single byte unless I was to sacrifice the diagonal walls and the halving of the sample space that goes along with reserving the high bit of a byte for the “hey, I’m a perpindicular wall” indicator

#24

I assumed that a lot of the walls would be the same size.