Pakettic is a command-line tool for minifying and compressing TIC-80 fantasy console carts. The tool is written in Python (3.9+) and used especially for sizecoding. It compresses existing carts approximately ~1.2% better than best alternatives, and by using its magic comments, pakettic might find code that compresses even better.
Installing with pip:
$ pip install pakettic
Installing the latest main branch from GitHub:
$ pip install git+https://github.com/vsariola/pakettic.git@main
Installing a checked out version of the repository:
$ pip install -e path/to/pakettic
Installing a checked out version of the repository using poetry for a nice virtual environment with locked dependencies (run inside the pakettic folder):
$ poetry install
To compress a cart, run:
$ pakettic path/to/cart.tic
If your PATH is not configured to include pip installed executables, you can use
$ python -m pakettic path/to/cart.tic
If you installed using poetry into a virtual environment, you need to
prepend poetry run
before every command e.g.
$ poetry run pakettic path/to/cart.tic
Pakettic supports both .tic and .lua carts. Multiple input files may be
defined. Input files are globbed, so ?
, *
, and **
work as
wildcards for a single character, multiple characters and a directory,
respectively.
For a full list of command line options, see:
$ pakettic --help
See also tips for command line arguments
Running all tests:
$ poetry run python -m unittest discover -s tests
Pakettic first parses the LUA-script to an abstract syntax tree, and then uses a local optimization algorithm (simulated annealing, late acceptance hill climbing or its variant diversified late acceptance search) to randomly mutate the syntax tree & see if it compresses better. Implemented mutations include:
- shortening variable names
- flipping comparisons
>
,<
,>=
,<=
,~=
, and==
- reordering arithmetic operators
+
,-
,*
and/
and bit logic operators&
,~
and|
- converting
a^2
intoa*a
and vice versa - using either single or double quotes for all strings
- converting whole hexadecimals into decimals
- convert
for a,b,1 do
intofor a,b do
and vice versa - reordering statements: statements that can be reordered are marked with magic comments
- alternative expressions: alternatives are marked with magic comments
- folding constant expressions
Internally, pakettic uses zopfli for the compression.
load'<code>'
is parsed as function(...)<code>end
so you can easily
recompress already compressed carts. Conversely, function()<code>end
or function(...)<code>end
is replaced with load'<code>'
during
compression.
Note that function(...)<code>end
and load'<code>'
are not 100%
semantically identical: the load version cannot access locals in the outer
scope. For example: local x="hello" function f()print(x)end
works but
local x="hello" f=load'print(x)'
does not. Since locals are rarely
used in size-coding, we default to using the load-trick, but you can
disable it with the command-line parameter --no-load
.
However, pakettic does not convert functions with parameters. In
particular, pakettic does not automatically convert
function SCN(x)<code>end
into SCN=load'x=...<code>'
, because they
are not semantically identical: in the load version, x
is now global
and thus could trash a global variable, unintentionally breaking the
cart. To make SCN
compress nicely, you have to write it as
function SCN(...)x=...<code>end
, taking responsibility for x
not
overwriting anything important.
Unnecessary parentheses are removed from expressions so you do not have to worry about those.
The algorithm will try to reorder statements between --{
and --}
.
For example:
--{
a="hello"
b="world"
--}
will try both a="hello"b="world"
and b="world"a="hello"
to see which
compresses better.
Notice that only complete statements can be reordered. Thus, this will NOT work:
--{
for x=0,239 do
for y=0,135 do
--}
end
end
A good rule of thumb is that you should be able to replace --{
and
--}
with do
and end
, respectively, and still have valid code.
Statements between --{!
and --}
are not ordered, so you can make
blocks of statements that are kept in order within a pair of --{
and
--}
tags.
There is a special --|
operator that allows alternative expressions to
be tested, to see if they compress better. For example: 5--|4--|6
means that the algorithm will try 4 and 6 in place of the 5. This will
naturally show up as a comment in LUA so you will have to continue the
expression on next line if this is in the middle of an expression. --|
has the lowest precedence, even lower than ^
, so put parentheses if
you want to try more complicated expressions e.g. (x//256)--|(x>>8)
Pakettic treats --![
and --!]
as multiline comment tags, while LUA
treats these as single line comments. Useful for including debug code in
the unpacked intro: the code will not be included in the packed cart.
- If pakettic complains about CODE_ZIP chunk size, the code is just too
big after compression. In TIC-80, CODE_ZIP chunks do not support
multiple banks (and likely never will, as the feature is already
deprecated), and thus are unfortunately limited to 65535 bytes.
--uncompressed
is a temporary fix, but code will be uncompressed and thus the size much larger. - The Zopfli compression level can be set with
-z<level>
, with level ranging from 0 to 5. When developing, start with-z0
for fast optimization, and only increase when necessary e.g. when you are just a few bytes over the limit. The default Zopfli-level is 0. - The algorithm uses a pseudorandom generator. Sometimes using a
different seed finds a few byte better or worse solution. Use command
line argument
--seed
to try different seeds. - Similarly, different optimization heuristics produce slightly
different results. Try different heuristics e.g. with
-alahc
,-adlas
or-aanneal
. - To avoid re-optimizing all the expressions every time, do a long
optimization run, study the results and change your expressions to the
forms that pack well. Set the number of steps with
-s
. Use command-line argument-p
to always print a reasonably readable version of the best solution when one is found. - By default, pakettic only includes CODE and DEFAULT chunks. DEFAULT
indicates that before loading the cart, TIC-80 loads the default cart,
setting default palette, waveforms etc. If you don't need the default
values (e.g. you set the palette yourself), save one byte by only
including CODE chunk in the cart:
-ccode
- Working on a tweet-cart? Use
-l
to output LUA carts, which are uncompressed. The optimization algorithm then just optimizes the uncompressed size of the code. - If the packed cart is missing sprites, music, map etc., try adding
-call
(or something more specific) to include necessary chunks. - Do you want to use the TIC-80 sprites or the tracker, but don't like
the fact that the data chunks are uncompressed? Use
-d
to have pakettic automatically convert all data chunks into hexadecimal strings in the code, along with a small stub placed at the beginning of the code that interprets the string and loads the data at correct address. For example,-d -cCODE,MUSIC,PATTERNS,WAVEFORM,SAMPLES,DEFAULT
would include the necessary chunks for the music.
- At the moment, all the branches of swappable operators are assumed to be without side effects. If they have side-effects, the swapping might inadvertedly swap the execution order of the two branches.
- The parser can crash with large carts. Carts in the size coding range (few thousand characters) do not seem to cause problems, but crashes have been observed parsing carts with tens of thousands of code characters. This may be related to how the pyparsing grammar is defined, which could result in highly recursive parsing and eventually stack overflows.
Code contributors: Veikko Sariola/pestis, wojciech-graj, koorogi
Test corpus contributors: psenough, ilmenit, gigabates, gasman, pellicus, luchak.
The test corpus carts have their own licenses, see the license files in the subdirectories of the corpus directory.