Fill with sand

Mon, 31 Oct 2022 20:56:08 UTC

Fill with sand

by assemblerbot

[Click to Play]

Description

Fill with sand is sand/dust puzzle game. In each level you have to create a mechanism that solves the puzzle.
Each level can be solved usually in multiple ways (tested).

Technical notes

Simulation is deterministic - same inputs yield same results (if not let me know and I have to fix it). Framerate should be stable no matter what you do.

The game is unfinished but it's already playable. Feedback is welcome. Have fun!

Changelog

Version 3

+2 levels

Version 2

new feature: prohibited materials
+1 level

Version 1

added small delay to cursor movement for more precise painting
added tutorials/showcases to levels 2-5

Version 0

initial commit

LZ77 picture compression

Sat, 27 Mar 2021 10:23:42 UTC

Hello,
as any of you guys I need some decent picture compression for the Pico Off Road game I'm making. PX-9 is very good choice but one of my passions always were compression algorithms. So I've decided to implement one myself. Sometimes is better and sometimes is worse than other available algorithms here. Consider it as my addition to the community and use it wherever you need.

Algorithm

LZ77 is very simple compression method that works similar to RLE with the exception: while RLE copies the same character N times LZ77 copies chunk of already decoded data of length N. I've used 3 different blocks: direct color output, offset + length block and just length for coherent rows (sequence that starts on the same X position but in previous row). Compression allows self-overlapping (for example offset 3 and length 20 is valid, it just copies itself with offset).

For more information check https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LZ77_and_LZ78#LZ77

Limits

designed for PICO-8 pictures only (or any arrays of values in interval 0..15), don't try it on map or other binary data
picture size limit is 128x128
compression uses simple brute force search and can be very slow (up to a minute on fast PC), but who cares?
decompressor is 131 tokens long and is relatively fast
it's guaranteed that the compressed stream never contains ] character so it's safe to keep it in [[..]] raw lua string
compressed stream doesn't contain capital letters (A..Z)
size of the picture is not in the compressed stream so you have to know it ahead

Tips

LZ77 from it's nature is good for compressing repeated patterns. For example images that use 2 color gradients with Bayer-Matrix dithering have usually much better compression ratios than images with random dithering.

Large blocks of single color are also compressed with high rations but expect much longer compression times.

Example

Load cartridge, import yourimage.png, in function _init edit w,h (width and height of the area you want to compress) and run. Result is written to compressed.txt.
For example following image is ideal for LZ77 - compressed size is just 1157 bytes.

Code

Whole code including cartridge and test picture is on Git (license CC0) https://github.com/assemblerbot/pico8-lz77 .

If you want to copy-paste it, here it is:

Compressor

max_run_len=100

function lz77_out_a(value) -- 0..15
    if value<0 or value>15 then
        stop("value 𝘢 out of range! "..value)
    end

    return chr(value+32)
end

function lz77_out_b(value) -- 0..178
    if value<0 or value>178 then
        stop("value 𝘣 out of range! "..value)
    end

    if value<17 then
        return chr(value+48)
    else
        return chr(value+94-17)
    end
end

function lz77_out_c(value) -- 0..194
    if value<0 or value>194 then
        stop("value 𝘤 out of range! "..value)
    end

    if value<33 then
        return chr(value+32)
    else
        return chr(value+94-33)
    end
end

function lz77_comp(x0,y0,w,h,vget)
    local pixels={}
    for y=0,h-1 do
        for x=0,w-1 do
            add(pixels,vget(x0+x,y0+y))
        end
    end

    local out=""
    local i=1
    while i<=#pixels do
        local p=pixels[i]

        local run=0
        local ofs=0
        for j=max(1,i-195),i-1 do
            local k=0
            while i+k<=#pixels and pixels[i+k]==pixels[j+k] do k+=1 end
            if k>run or (k>=run-1 and i-j==w) then
                run=k
                ofs=i-j
            end
        end

        if run<2 or (run==2 and ofs~=w) then
            -- direct pixel output
            out=out..lz77_out_a(p)
            i+=1
        elseif ofs==w then
            -- row with coherence
            run=min(run,178-(max_run_len+1)+2)

            out=out..lz77_out_b(run-2+max_run_len+1)
            i+=run
        else
            -- run
            run=min(run,max_run_len+2)

            out=out..lz77_out_b(run-2)
            out=out..lz77_out_c(ofs-1)

            i+=run
        end
    end
    return out
end

Decompressor

function lz77_decomp(x0,y0,w,h,src,vset)
    local i,d=1,{}
    while i<=#src do
        local c=ord(src,i)
        if c<48 then
            add(d,c-32)
        else
            local ofs,run=w,c-46
            if c>=94 then
                run-=29
            end
            if run>=103 then
                run-=101
            else
                i+=1
                ofs=ord(src,i)-31
                if ofs>=63 then
                    ofs-=29
                end
            end
            local pos=#d-ofs
            for j=1,run do
                add(d,d[pos+j])
            end
        end
        i+=1
    end
    for i=0,w*h-1 do
        vset(i%w+x0,i\w+y0,d[i+1])
    end
end

Main

function _init()
    local x,y=0,0 --source position
    local w,h=128,128 --source size

    local lz77=lz77_comp(x,y,w,h,sget)
    print("size="..#lz77)
    printh(lz77,"compressed.txt")
    --lz77_decomp(x,y,w,h,lz77,pset)
    flip()
    stop()
end

Have fun! :-)

Pico Off Road

Sun, 07 Mar 2021 17:51:02 UTC

picooffroad

by assemblerbot

[Click to Play]

About

Pico Off Road is a racing game inspired by the classic Ironman Super Off Road. There are 5 car colors to choose from (equal by parameters), three tracks that can be played in both directions. Player can choose from two modes - single race or tournament. There is one "hidden" mode: single race with 0 opponents can be considered as a practice.

Menu controls

Z = confirm
X = back

Driving controls

arrows = turning, throttle, reverse
Z = nitro
X = throttle (for controllers if you can't press left/right + forward at the same time)

Tech

Pico Off Road uses combination of 2D sprites, 3D height map and real-time rendered meshes (cars).

Contact

@assembler_bot

Links

Standalone builds: itch.io
Sources: GitHub

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