ssssshhhrink!

Monday, June 25. 2007
I've done some interesting experiments during the last days. The result of those experiments is the first (or: at least the first I know about) Huffman entropy encoding implementation (plus a word-replacement precoding for additional compression) written in Lua. Well, actually I've only implemented the decoder in Lua, the matching encoder is implemented in Java, because I had a practical use for all of this in mind: I intend to use this to save a few hundred kilobytes of the memory space that's taken by the quest objective texts in the MobMap quest database (and another few hundred kilobytes in a different, new database that's gonna be added in the next MobMap version :D ).

Aside from that practical use, it was kind of fun and a definitive learning experience to implement a data compression and decompression algorithm myself with the additional challenge to get the decompressor to work in the Lua environment.