Scratch

hey, some pretty innovative ideas for saving! I never thought of data storage in long strings!

How many tiles are there in this thing? Maybe a base 16 wouldn't be too bad.

Is there a reason why you can't use a base 32, for example? The 26 letters + 10 numbers would be perfect for a 32bit storage (with only 4 waste characters)    I would consider this as an option, unless it really becomes difficult to store your tile data in a non-square number.

As for solving the Aa Bb problem, I'm not sure whether there is any go-around. It's been tried before, and there have been successful steps forward, but I can't tell you whether or not the target has been reached because I simply do not know.

Good luck with your system anyway!

cocolover76 wrote:

blob8108 wrote:

I was trying to write a base 64 converter for a small tile-based project: the idea being to compress the data describing the tiles to be (slightly) shorter than a 300-character long sequence of the digits 0-3. I thought no-one would bother typing out such a long sequence (sadly, compressing it wasn't as effective as I'd hoped  ).

Base 64 uses the digits ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz 0123456789-_ to describe the numbers 0-63, so in theory, I could fit three times as much data into each byte.

Then, of course, I realised Scratch's string comparison operators are case-insensitive — ie.
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/9598124/Screens … arison.png

...which means that I can't use base 64 after all. I could do base 16 (0123456789abcdef), but then I only get two tiles per byte, which isn't a lot.


So:

* Is there any way of doing case-sensitive string comparison in Scratch?

* Can we copy text straight out of Scratch yet? I think you can paste into the "ask" field, but I didn't think you could copy.

* Any thoughts about what I'm doing? Have you successfully achieved any amount of compression in Scratch? Have you made "codes" for a tile-based game, or something similar? Is it even worth doing?

Many thanks! 

As far as I know, there should be a Spanish or Italian or Greek or Russian character for each letter in the alphabet.

I think we're looking for something the user can enter here, not more characters. If you really needed more characters, you could start using symbols and stuff!

Yes.

LS97 wrote:

hey, some pretty innovative ideas for saving! I never thought of data storage in long strings!

Sadly, it's not my idea... 

LS97 wrote:

How many tiles are there in this thing? Maybe a base 16 wouldn't be too bad.

Is there a reason why you can't use a base 32, for example? The 26 letters + 10 numbers would be perfect for a 32bit storage (with only 4 waste characters)    I would consider this as an option, unless it really becomes difficult to store your tile data in a non-square number.

As for solving the Aa Bb problem, I'm not sure whether there is any go-around. It's been tried before, and there have been successful steps forward, but I can't tell you whether or not the target has been reached because I simply do not know.

Good luck with your system anyway!

There are 300 tiles, which can each have a value of 0 to 3. This makes 2 bits of information.

With base 32, you get 5 bits of data, which makes fitting in 2-bit tiles really awkward (You'd have to spread 3 tiles across 2 bytes) -- but yes, that could work. 

Thanks!

Last edited by blob8108 (2011-11-16 13:16:37)

scimonster wrote:

Yes.

Thank you!    Lists is quite a good idea, and should at least solve the case-sensing problem. I shall try this!

Nice idea! I think I made a base64 converter in BYOB once. I might look at it again...

blob8108 wrote:

I was trying to write a base 64 converter for a small tile-based project: the idea being to compress the data describing the tiles to be (slightly) shorter than a 300-character long sequence of the digits 0-3. I thought no-one would bother typing out such a long sequence (sadly, compressing it wasn't as effective as I'd hoped  ).

Base 64 uses the digits ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz 0123456789-_ to describe the numbers 0-63, so in theory, I could fit three times as much data into each byte.

Then, of course, I realised Scratch's string comparison operators are case-insensitive — ie.
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/9598124/Screens … arison.png

...which means that I can't use base 64 after all. I could do base 16 (0123456789abcdef), but then I only get two tiles per byte, which isn't a lot.


So:

* Is there any way of doing case-sensitive string comparison in Scratch?
Yes, Sci Linked to the wiki 
* Can we copy text straight out of Scratch yet? I think you can paste into the "ask" field, but I didn't think you could copy.
you can import vars and list
* Any thoughts about what I'm doing? Have you successfully achieved any amount of compression in Scratch? Have you made "codes" for a tile-based game, or something similar? Is it even worth doing?
Ive done base 16, never 64. i just used two base 16 digits [16*16=256]
Many thanks! 

Last edited by hello12345678910 (2011-11-26 08:58:56)

MathWizz wrote:

* Can we copy text straight out of Scratch yet? I think you can paste into the "ask" field, but I didn't think you could copy

You can copy from lists in the flash player. 

...can you?    That'd be great — I can't make it work, though!