| Blockland Forums > General Discussion |
| What's the purpose of ColorIDs? |
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| Xalos:
--- Quote from: Reactor Worker on February 17, 2013, 05:16:12 AM ---Yes, it would only increase the number of bits by a factor of five. --- End quote --- A factor of four (again, remember, those two extra bits are virtually definitely unused), and that's beside the point. A single chat message in Blockland, assuming chat uses ASCII, would be anywhere from one byte to (maximum string length)+1 bytes. Either way, it would average out to be vastly longer than an RGBA color value. Sure, it would technically be a larger strain on a server's bandwidth - in the same way that three ounces is a larger strain on your hand than two ounces. But have you ever seen someone keel over dead from an extra ounce of weight? |
| Ephialtes:
You're talking about using 32 bits to represent the color of potentially up to 256,000 bricks instead of 6 bits. That's a difference of around 817 kB. That's crazy. |
| Reactor Worker:
--- Quote from: Xalos on February 17, 2013, 05:27:34 AM ---A factor of four (again, remember, those two extra bits are virtually definitely unused), and that's beside the point. A single chat message in Blockland, assuming chat uses ASCII, would be anywhere from one byte to (maximum string length)+1 bytes. Either way, it would average out to be vastly longer than an RGBA color value. Sure, it would technically be a larger strain on a server's bandwidth - in the same way that three ounces is a larger strain on your hand than two ounces. But have you ever seen someone keel over dead from an extra ounce of weight? --- End quote --- It's 6 bits versus the 32 bits needed for RGBA. That's over a factor of 5. You're assuming the extra 2 bits in each byte are unavailable which may or may not be true for the TGE. In any case, a 4x increase could be significant. Your chat example has little relevance; on a bad day you might get a couple lines of text per second. When you are loading bricks you are typically working with thousands of them and you want to get them in the shortest time possible. That is where a few extra bits starts to hurt you. Not all players have the luxury of a broadband connection. That pretty much answers your initial question "why have colorID's?". It's a tradeoff; the reduced color selection allows for more people to access the game. |
| Xalos:
Both good points; fair enough. I concede. |
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