Compression in the game Full Quiet
a day ago
- #compression
- #retro gaming
- #game development
- Retrotainment Games' Full Quiet utilizes multiple layers of compression to fit a large open world into a half-megabyte NES cartridge.
- Text compression is achieved using DTE (digram tree encoding), which replaces common 2-character sequences with single-byte references, reducing text data size by 38%.
- Color data is heavily compressed by reducing 24-bit colors to 6-bit, using palettes, and employing subpalettes to cut storage from 696 MB to around 19 MB across three dayparts.
- Graphics are organized into 8x8 pixel tiles, with shared tiles across mapsets and run-length encoding (PB8) further reducing tile data by 30.4% for unique tiles.
- Metatiles (combinations of tiles into larger blocks) and hierarchical compression reduce map data significantly, achieving 0.0278 bits per pixel and fitting the world into 51.4% of the ROM capacity.