Question about storing tilemaps in data

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More of a question for the devs who are familiar with the way tilemaps are stored (cough cough @richard couch cough)

In a stream i don’t know when, you mentioned that images take up alot of space, same for tilemaps, where for every tile you need to know exactly which tile it is and if it is a wall (correct me if i’m wrong).

My idea was storing tilemaps as strings of text that the game can then turn INTO tilemaps, hopefully reducing space. (See my tilemap-to-text attempt here: Tilemap to text)

My question is: would storing strings of text like this take up more bytes than having all the actual tilemaps in the project?

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TL;DR answer: No.

Images take up a lot of space, yes. They’re already stored in an idealized form when saved in a project, so saving images yet again in a different format likely will not help.

Tilemaps, themselves, do not take up much space. It’s the images for the tiles that do. So, ditto above.

Best advice: Use the asset manager for all of your assets (images, music, tilemaps, etc.).

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