Serialization for C# Games

Serialization for C# Games
chickensoft.games

There are some echoes of this with things like Lua's Pluto/Eris, or serializable continuations in other languages (eg: Perl's Continuity).

It's just such a pain to thoroughly handle that sort of stuff without language-level support. And doing a "good enough" approach with some rough edges is usually shippable, so it's hard to build a critical mass of demand for such support. And even if there was, it's very hard to add it to a language/framework/etc that wasn't designed for it to begin with.

I've had a decent experience with 'struct string' style approaches, like Lua's string.pack() or Perl's pack()[3]. It's a little brittle, but extremely straightforward and "not framework-y," which suits me. But it leaves out things like program execution state; it's just for plain data.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smalltalk#Image-based_persiste...

[2] example of using this serializable statefulness for serving web apps: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seaside_(software)

[3] https://perldoc.perl.org/functions/pack

    public interface IStashy
    {
        void Save(T t, K id);
        T Load(K id);
        IEnumerable LoadAll();
        void Delete(K id);
        K GetNewId();
    }

There’s a small number of gotchas, for which I have well known work arounds:

- I generally won’t remove a property, but mark it as obsolete and stop using it.

- If I’ve added a new Boolean property, I’d tend to name it such that it defaults to false, or if it must default to true, have it stored in a nullable boolean, and if it loads as null (from an older instance of the type), set it to the default.

- some convenient types I want to use (as properties) are not serializable, so before saving I’ll copy their data into a serializable type, like an array of key values, then on loading rehydrate that to a dictionary. (I guess this is a harsh performance penalty if you’re doing a lot of it in a game)

And very cursory search suggests maybe there is nothing to that guess: https://www.reddit.com/r/golang/comments/tqffv2/packaging_an...

It's an interesting question because I've run into some datascientists that were so used to working in memory with dataframes and similar that they moved mountains to do things like de-duplicate csv's in memory (that they couldn't all fit in at once) where-as they could have done so trivially with sqlite.