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AppGameKit Classic Chat / Faster and more efficient data storage -- Bit-flags, Nibbles, Bytes, DoubleBytes

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Nieb
10
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Joined: 13th May 2014
Location: Lurking
Posted: 8th Aug 2018 14:48
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While working on a project that uses large amounts of data, I decided to use bit flags, and such, to store more data in less vars. Greatly speeding up loading and lowering memory usage.

Attached is a sample project with all the functions I'm using, enjoy!
@_Nieb_

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Phaelax
DBPro Master
21
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Joined: 16th Apr 2003
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Posted: 9th Aug 2018 16:52
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I don't see how it would be faster, and I suppose it could use less memory. But is there really any benefit when to set a nibble you call a function that takes 12 bytes of information passed to it?

Don't get me wrong, it's neat. I enjoy bitwise math. I'd see a greater benefit when storing map data, or when multiple flags can be set for the same action.
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GarBenjamin
AGK Developer
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Joined: 30th Nov 2016
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Posted: 9th Aug 2018 17:11
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Phaelax I think he meant only faster loading the data in because it would be much smaller. Using it would definitely be somewhat slower.

I like the idea for flags as well and have done that kind of thing like you said for tile attribute flags etc.
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Nieb
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Posted: 9th Aug 2018 17:25 Edited at: 9th Aug 2018 17:42
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Suppose you are right there. The functions are a bit on the expensive side, could do without the range checks & multiplication. They might not perform so well in long loops. Though I learned a lot while working on them, I can refer to them while implementing optimized code.

The performance increase I noticed is with loading. I had several large arrays for map data, I was able to consolidate them into a single array. Which caused a considerable decrease in loading/setup time.

Just noticed I left a few "asdf" loop indexes in there.
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