And I know people think I'm being ridiculous for constantly striving to make tile square assemblies work in my engine, thinking they're an archaic feature of the 8-bit generation necessary due to hardware limits. While it is true cartridges had only so much memory to store data on, the simple fact that TSAs were used is proof they work for all generations of programming. Castlevania 3 even showed they're not required on an NES game, as it mapped out entire screens tile-by-tile in the ROM data.

That's what people seem to forget: TSAs have no use in the RAM, they're only for ROM conservation. They keep the file size small. Why correlate 1KB of ROM to 1KB of RAM when you could quadruple that and correlate 1KB of ROM to 4KB of RAM with TSAs? Attribute tables won't make any difference though. Not with how GM handles backgrounds.

I still firmly stand by my belief that TSAs are the way to design games, lazy programmers be damned. I'm one of the laziest people in the world, but that doesn't mean I excuse wasteful programming. I waste so much time on R&D so you guys can progress beyond newbie programmers up to resourceful programmers able to work with platforms that have more limited resources. ... Okay, so you probably won't be making 2D platformers on a PS4, but the fundamentals and principles you pick up from my research will aid you in the long run.