Blue Lightening Level Codes

[bruce182]

Anyone else wonder why the letters in the blue ligtening level codes only go from A to P, rather than A to Z like most games.

[+rdemming]

Anyone else wonder why the letters in the blue ligtening level codes only go from A to P, rather than A to Z like most games.

 

Well, with A ... P you have 16 letters. So to encode 16 letters you need 4 bits (2^4=16). So with one byte (8 bits), you can store two letters of the level code.

With 26 letters you need 5 bits to encode a letter. 2^5=32 possibilities. So you waste 6 possible values and you can not encode two letters in one byte.

So using only 16 letters makes it easier and more efficient to store the level code.

 

Sorry for the quite technical answer.

 

Robert

[bruce182]

No worries mate, thats exactly kind of anwser I was looking for. I new there *MUST* have been a reason why they only used A to P instead of A to Z. I did not count the letters, 16 would have given me a clue.

 

Cheers for solving my question

 

Bruce

 

ps, in Gates of Zedecon do they use 16 letters or is it the full 26, from what I can remember of the codes there are 'BOYZ', 'SNEX', etc, I think the letters S and B come up a lot. Have they used a selection of 16 of the 26 letters or the whole 26.

[bruce182]

Gates of Zendecon only uses 11 letters?

 

Any reason?