Today's work has been mostly of the external variety.
First off, compressing a level..
I'm taking 160x160 pixels, each one being around about 16 different colors (give or take, depending on what walls/floors/etc I bother to add.) and trying to bundle them up into a teensy tiny bit of data.
To me, compression's a fun time, where you get to play with lots of fiddly numbers, and chaotic maths, just to get large things down to size.
Today, however, .png is annoying me.
Because my 160x160 is down to about 3716 bytes and png's is 1007..
Bugger!

But at least my version is a neatly formatted string, and not a nasty mess of binary data, which means I'll be able to upload and download these things in a relatively easy manner.
I'm still working on the compression, mind, so I'll probably get it down a teensy bit further still.

Meanwhile I'm starting to think about the uploaded highscores, and how I'll be able to keep track of them. You might be aware that I've already created a nice highscore system for basic games, so I'll be nicking parts of that code. The checksums, the user handling, and things of that nature will be grabbed and used in this game, since they work well enough.
I'm also going to use shorter checksum values to check each level between the player and the scoreboard server. It'll help relieve the strain that the last one took. (The previous one used the whole level as a checksum, so entire chunks of data kept being sent back and forth each time you updated your highscores!!! Hey, it worked, stop moaning!!)
Hopefully I won't end up with any nastily clashing levels, and if there are any clashes, I'll implement some kind of double checking system to be sure of which one's which. (!)


With all this input/output/overthenetput work, there's not much to show off, really. But rest assured that the game's coming together little by little..
..
Even if it's not actually loading the saved levels, or doing anything over the internet, yet!!