[purple-leafy]

Yes you are definitely onto something! Love to see more people talking about deterministic games.

My game is strictly deterministic, so I get bot movement for free - but the player has agency so I need to capture their deviations

That’s the tricky part! Right now I do capture input (actually just deviations) and can replay whole games, but I think I’m at the limits in terms of compression - talking bytes here not KB

[AlotOfReading]

How much did your clever approach save over a naive approach + file compression?

[purple-leafy]

I will post back with real numbers tonight, but naive approach did not compress well at all (KB easily).

But of the “smart” approaches (pre compression):

- 5 move motif over 2 bytes - best

- 2 move motif - insanely small

- 2 move motif with non linear tick delta even better

- “naive” 1 byte cardinal directions (worst)

- less-naive - byte relative direction changes (middle of the pack)

—-

But post compression with brotli the naive approach was second best and the less-naive approach was first (2-10% better than naive), I was so bummed that the better ones didn’t compress as well (about 10% worse than second best on average)