Yes you are definitely onto something! Love to see more people talking about deterministic games.

My game is strictly deterministic, so I get bot movement for free - but the player has agency so I need to capture their deviations

That’s the tricky part! Right now I do capture input (actually just deviations) and can replay whole games, but I think I’m at the limits in terms of compression - talking bytes here not KB

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AlotOfReading a day ago | parent [-]

How much did your clever approach save over a naive approach + file compression?

	▲	purple-leafy a day ago \| parent [-]
		I will post back with real numbers tonight, but naive approach did not compress well at all (KB easily). But of the “smart” approaches (pre compression): - 5 move motif over 2 bytes - best - 2 move motif - insanely small - 2 move motif with non linear tick delta even better - “naive” 1 byte cardinal directions (worst) - less-naive - byte relative direction changes (middle of the pack) —- But post compression with brotli the naive approach was second best and the less-naive approach was first (2-10% better than naive), I was so bummed that the better ones didn’t compress as well (about 10% worse than second best on average)