I decided today to take a stab at making the sparse nodes truly sparse. And I had a bit of inspiration about how to do it that didn’t seem too onerous (using a simple dictionary with key of x combined with z). I did some reading about performance, and it didn’t sound too bad. The code ended up being fairly easy as well, after I got past an initial issue where, despite looking like integers (and even printing as such), the calculated indices weren’t, and they subtly didn’t equate. Quite frustrating until I threw an “int” cast around the index calculation, and things became sane again.

The idea is that all levels will have the same virtual space, which more or less defines the coordinates, but only the points used get recorded. Quite sparse. I just have to pick a good max size that will work with all levels. (Although… since the dimensions are stored, they could be made to vary per level without breaking old levels.)

Sometimes I wonder if I’m doing this to avoid working on levels. But actually, this stuff needs to be worked out now. In fact, I’m going to have to recreate the (few) levels I have so far, as the format has changed. I wouldn’t want to have to migrate a lot of them.

Once that is all in place, I’ll be ready to start recreating some of the more expansive levels from the 2D game.

Progress on day 22.