A Walnut's Thoughts

A while back, I made a small application meant to demonstrate some important principles about RTS design, namely that unit stats in a vacuum can be very misleading. As a quick example, stalkers have ~9.7 dps on paper. When fighting marines though, their effective DPS drops to ~8.4 (8.2 with combat shields) due to overkill. That's about the same DPS as a sentry. Unfortunately, there's only so much info that can be extracted from a Time To Kill calculation between two units.

I encountered a neat example recently while solving Advent of Code 2015, day 6. The problem can be boiled down to "There is a 2D array of values. Given a range and instruction, apply the instruction to all values in that range. How many values are 'on' at the end?". There are only 2 possible states for each value: on and off, and only 3 possible instructions: on, off, and toggle. I won't focus too much on parsing the input or the structure of the algorithm here, I just want to investigate the hot loop which applies the instruction to each value.

I've seen this question come up a few times on r/ssbm and while I've given hand-wavey answers before, I find myself in a good place to answer more rigorously now. We can break this question down to more basic ones: "how many bytes of replay data correspond to a single frame of gameplay?" and "how many bytes in the replay are unrelated to frames?". From there, we can estimate a duration by simply translating the 16.667ms per frame to minutes and seconds.

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