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> Putting the (very valid) reasons for not having human-readable game saves aside, I don't follow. What would the reasons be?
A human-readable game save file is presumably human-editable.
(There is no way to prevent changes by a knowledgeable person with time or tools, so that's not a goal)
This is the kind of thing I'd expect from Raymond Chen - which is extremely high praise! I'm glad they tracked it down even further to figure out exactly why.
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Worked fine on the target machines and the "0.5x programmer" got to see their family for winter holiday. Or are you saying they should have defensively programmed around a bug manifesting 21 years later and skip seeing their family during crunch time? To be honest, I just don't like how you disparaged the programmer out-of-context. Talk is cheap.
Using a well–written third–party library would not increase the development time; it would in fact reduce it. No risk of missing Christmas there.
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> Putting the (very valid) reasons for not having human-readable game saves aside, I don't follow. What would the reasons be?
A human-readable game save file is presumably human-editable.
This is the kind of thing I'd expect from Raymond Chen - which is extremely high praise! I'm glad they tracked it down even further to figure out exactly why.
Raymond is a wizard. Read his blogs for many years and love his style and knowledge.
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You misunderstood. Game developers should use a _good_ third–party library, not a _bad_ one. At a minimum they should be able to read the source code so that they know it is good. Thus open source libraries should be at the top of the list. If you don't know what “good” looks like, take a look at [Serde]( https://serde.rs/ ). It’s for Rust, but its features and overall design are something you should attempt to appro…
There are no good third party libraries
The only C code that I have recently interacted with uses a home–grown JSON “library” that is actually pretty good. In particular it produces good error messages. If it were extracted out into its own project then I would be able to recommend it as a library.
https://web.archive.org/web/20250423144746/https://cookieplm...
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Why weren't binary files used like I would expect in the 1990's DOS game? fread into a struct and all that
By the 2000s, portability was a concern for most titles. Certainly anything targeted at a rapidly changing console market back then.