Heh, this grid image is all too familiar to me right now.

I’m building a grid based game and engine, and I have a game replay format which is not video.

I hit a massive wall with compression, trying to compress unit pathing and was trying to solve a similar solution.

Given an NxN grid, and the 4 cardinal directions (NSEW) you can move in, plus an extra action that makes you move 2 cells instead of 1, and considering you can move 4 cells per second…

What’s the smallest worst-case raw compression artefact you can output for 1 player for a 1 minute game?

It’s an extremely fun problem to solve. I tried:

- encoding changes into bits eg using 2 bits for direction

- movement pattern batching (ie batching 2 moves into 3 bits)

- crowd patterns and movement prediction

- treating movement as a “projectile” and deriving intermediate states

And all sorts of other wild crap that I will write up about on game launch