Save file compression

Ok i didnt see anything about this topic here so here goes.
the save file is slightly on the large side, as mentioned by Slaihne himself. (btw if your reading this great game)
So after alot of building you get above 200 megs which is kinda ridiculos.
My Fix for this is to right-click the testsave folder and under the general tab, click advanced.
Then, check the box that says "Compress contents to save disk space" this takes the size down to about 10 megs yes 10 not 100.
so Slaihne, if you read this im sure there are some free zip compression libraries to implement into blokworld in future releases.
Thanks,
Jombo23

Hi jombo22,

I know the chunk saves are huge, but haven't put it as a priority yet. It was simply a case of; it works at the moment so why fix it. You should see the size of some of my saves

I also don't want to go down the road of a Zip library since there may be speed issues which i wouldn't neccessarily be able to solve. Also, Zip may be small but a content aware compression scheme should be smaller (at least i think).

My plan is an Octree compression for the chunk and then a differences journal for each block added or removed in the chunk. This means that most of the time only a few bytes would need written. Then some sort of mechanism to merge the journal into the chunk every so often (when the journal gets too big).

This also factors into the multiplayer aspect since journal entries are the only thing that needs sent between the server and the player in terms of the landscape.

At the moment i am crunching math for the collisions on a slopey landscape but multiplayer and thus save compression will be my next priority.

that sounds like a great idea! however on the topic of slopes as much as i dont want to get off topic. i enabled slopes once then disabled and now half of them are stuck slopes and half are normal.
Now about the compression, i know that you are going to get to all of the things eventually, however i was just posting a cool little trick i found for those of us without 1tb drives .
getting off topic on slope colision. trust me i know almost nothing about programming. but.......
it seems like for every model, you could load a collision map for each object and have the "person" you walk around as be a sphere so that way it could stop on blocks and slide on slopes, rather than having to have slopes add to the Z location of the player, the Z could be free floating and whatever the "person" touched, depending on what it was could just have it slide on it depending on the collision maps or tables i forget. you probably shouldent listen to this....


Edit*for the zip speed issue, it takes no longer to load my map than before, but then again i have a true dual core running at 4.5ghz