Map Search V Slow

[BippyM]

I have noticed on a couple of occasions the map search is extremely slow when matching tiles.

I am currently trying to match Alfred Chicken and it is taking a good 2-3 minutes to run through the process. My screenshot is 320x256

Any reasons?

[Codetapper]

Yes, basically it's the garbage in-garbage out principle. Imagine you give it a match which is

0,0,0,0
0,0,0,0
0,0,1,0
3,4,6,7

The first 2 lines are completely useless, as there are potentially thousands of bytes in memory that are a run of the same value. Maptapper does 2 passes, one trying to find exact matches on that sequence, and if that fails it will look for any match with the same differences. Hence 10,10,10,10 would match the first line as the difference is 0. Then it has to check all other combinations to find if the match was good.

You must always give Maptapper a unique block of indexes or the search will be very slow.

And perhaps illogically, it is better to give maptapper a larger block to match than a small one. A grid of 6x6 indexes is far better than a grid of 3x3 as it can eliminate dud entries much quicker and try the next sequence.

With regards to matching a screenshot to tiles, if you have a lot of blank tiles to start with, this will also be very slow. I've seen one game where there about 60 blank tiles at the start, and all those have to be tested when matching.

If you want, upload the savestate and I can see what you're doing that's causing it to be so slow.

[BippyM]

It#s okay. I understand and Alfred Chicken had a bit of blank

Thanks again