Game Saving/Loading

You don''t want to save everything or the file will be huge. Create a asve packet that contains everythig essential for the state of the game but nothing more. Copy everything you need into it before you save and back out again after you load.

here is what i do and if you are using classes then it can work for you.

i have everything about my game world in classes..EVERYTHING
there are various classes that hold all the data for my game to work.

each class has a save and restore function

the save function will save all of that classes vital information to a passed in file handle (opened in main or something) to the save file.
the restore function will load all the vital information from a passed in file handle.

so if i have like 3 classes like
CWorld, CPlayer, CEnemy

then to save the game i would do

CWorld.save(filestream);
CPlayer.save(filestream);
CEnemy.save(filestream);

and then to restore you would

CWorld.save(filestream);
CPlayer.save(filestream);
CEnemy.save(filestream);



"A soldier is a part of the 1% of the population that keeps the other 99% free" - Lt. Colonel Todd, 1/38th Infantry, Ft. Benning, GA

quote:

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Original post by ncsu121978
here is what i do and if you are using classes then it can work for you.

i have everything about my game world in classes..EVERYTHING
there are various classes that hold all the data for my game to work.

each class has a save and restore function

the save function will save all of that classes vital information to a passed in file handle (opened in main or something) to the save file.
the restore function will load all the vital information from a passed in file handle.

so if i have like 3 classes like
CWorld, CPlayer, CEnemy

then to save the game i would do

CWorld.save(filestream);
CPlayer.save(filestream);
CEnemy.save(filestream);

and then to restore you would

CWorld.save(filestream);
CPlayer.save(filestream);
CEnemy.save(filestream);



"A soldier is a part of the 1% of the population that keeps the other 99% free" - Lt. Colonel Todd, 1/38th Infantry, Ft. Benning, GA

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Hmm, not a bad idea.

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Look, one of the few who hasn''t asked Salsa for an Avatar.
Nor do I follow the trend of putting "I don''t follow trends" in your sig.
Wait...

one major pain of game saving/loading is version control. make sure you implement some kind of version identifiers in your save chunks, and some checksum/markers as well. backward compatibily and reading old versions can make the code quite messy.

you can also use a text-file parsing system instead of a raw binary file system, to simplify the version control, but obviously the file size will be much bigger. then you can always convert the text files into binary files for release builds.

- my 2 cents.

quote:

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Original post by oliii
you can also use a text-file parsing system instead of a raw binary file system, to simplify the version control, but obviously the file size will be much bigger. then you can always convert the text files into binary files for release builds.
- my 2 cents.

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Just a few thoughts:

I wouldn''t do that, since you will have to keep track of two
versions for your load/save code then - one binary- and one text
mode part.

I''d rather suggest to use IFF format.

You can have a header chunk that provides version information
and simply reject save games that don''t match.

Alternatively it could be a good idea to use CSV if you choose
to stick with text format first. You can easily load and modify
such files using Microsoft Excel or OpenOffice for testing/
debugging.

XML also is a good idea for text-based load/save but it requires
more work for parsing and writing.

A hybrid approach would be saving to a text buffer and compressing
the buffer to disk (decompressing to text again during load).

Cheers,
Pat