@InspectorCaracal park editors*

@InspectorCaracal hmm

this won't guarantee you can plant the entire field but here's an idea:

start from 0,0 (or whatever top left is on your field)
0x00 0x## means next ## spaces are blank (no flower)
anything other than 0x00 means flower data

this would be a very rudimentary RLE in that you're compressing whitespace

but once you get enough flowers filling it up it'll overflow your save space regardless

@InspectorCaracal nonono.

you start at 0,0 right

say i store a string like

0x00 15
(code for red flower)
0x00 2
(code for blue flower)

and assume your field is 16 wide

this means:

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ R
_ _ B _ _ _ _ _ _ (etc...)

@InspectorCaracal actually you can save more space if you:

make blank space only one byte by keeping it under 128

use two blank space bytes if it's >127 (for a blank space > 127, store 127, x - 127 etc)

that way, you know it's a count for blank spaces if the leftmost bit is 0, otherwise it's a flower byte

@squirrel *attempts to wrap my mind around this*

I'm not getting it. .-.

@InspectorCaracal

let's go over your flower data again:
16 possible Flowers, that's 4 bits
8 Maturity stages, that's 3 bits
6 Leaf types, that's 3 bits
and Rarity, which is one bit
so:
0b1FFFFMMM 0bLLLR0000
first bit is 1 to indicate there's flower data, followed by 11 bits of data

if the first bit is 0, which would coincidentally be a number lower than 128, we treat it as blank space, no flower is planted

so:

0b0010000 = 16 blank spaces

@InspectorCaracal
if we see that in the save data, that means, starting from the top left, we skip 16 field spaces, then treat next byte, etc

@InspectorCaracal
if <byte> < 128, jump <byte> space in field, starting top left, going left to right
if <byte> >= 128, decode flower data <byte>, <byte+1>

does that make sense?

@squirrel oooh!! Yes, I got it!

Is there any way to use the rest of the second byte for the next flower or something, or do I have to divide the data into in byte-sized chunks?

@InspectorCaracal i wouldn't know of an easy way to do it... the bytes sort of help you know when to expect the next block of data, be it whitespace or flower data

@squirrel okay cool cool, so that puts me at a max # of flowers of about 126ish or so. An improvement~

Maybe I'll put a check in the save function, like, if you have too many flowers, you can't save, with a prompt telling you that you need to get rid of some flowers. That way it'd let you plant more flowers than that if you want to while playing.

@InspectorCaracal with this way, you can store up to 128 flowers (best case scenario, they're sequential and starting at top left) or at least ~85 flowers (blank space byte between each flower bytes)

not sure how to improve this any more :( sorry