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Posted By

Harry Potter
on 2022-01-06
15:17:04

Help wanted optimizing text adventure code

Hi! As you probably already know, I wrote some code for a text adventure for the Vic20 and the 16k C16 called AdvSkelVic65. It is the bare bones for a text adventure and was written to be as small as possible. You can find it at https://sourceforge.net/projects/cc65extra/files/game/. I'm asking for help to optimize it further. Any ideas?

Posted By

Mad
on 2022-01-08
12:39:07

Re: Help wanted optimizing text adventure code

Hi! I just looked briefly over the code some days ago. I just found some c files and some s files. I am not so into text adventures but some technique I used for a project of ours is to just use bitstreams instead of bytes. So if you know that for instance a switch only needs one bit you could encode it as one bit already. Or if you just have lower case letters in your texts you could encode them as 5 bit values. I know you already did your project so this suggestion is senseless for you, but I found it to be a great improvement in the amount of memory used in our case. (maybe you do that or other text optimizations already, too.) Good luck with your project.

Posted By

Harry Potter
on 2022-01-08
12:55:37

Re: Help wanted optimizing text adventure code

I thank you for your advice, but the problem with your technique is that I'm also using uppercase and control characters. I could use my own rendition of ZX0, a compression technique about which somebody on an Atari forum told me. It does a little better than the original.

Right now, it is not worth it, as I am only using a little RAM, but, as I'm using a system's extra memory in an upcoming version of this code, I can compress the text files and decompress them upon loading. It would cost more RAM but can save space on a disk image for large text adventures.

Posted By

Harry Potter
on 2022-01-09
07:34:28

Re: Help wanted optimizing text adventure code

Codey on the Lemon64 forum told me that I can tokenize often-used words or phrases to one byte. That is a good idea. Now, how can I optimize the code as it stands?

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