RTS saved map format?

Database?

In my previous game project, a TBS game, the maps were randomly generated. I only had to store the seed used to generate them, a bit of information about each player (their levels and resource) and the location and information for each ship's location.

Consider also: If your game uses prebuilt maps, just save the name of the map, and then save the units and their locations. You don't need to resave the entire map file, in every save. Ofcourse, if the map changes, the saves become invalid, and you need to be aware of that, and have some way to indentify if the maps changed. If your maps are randomly generated, just save the seed used to generate them.

If you do that, you could use XML if you wanted to. I've never used XML, but you could do something like this:



Or:



Then follow that with XML data for each player, and then more data for each unit. Since you are cutting out saving the entire map in each save file, the saves really won't be too large, unless each player has 500+ units.

You'll probably want to be serializing the appropriate objects (assuming you're programming this in an OO language), and it'll make your life much easier if you're using a decent serialization system - one which keeps track of which objects have been serialized, and redirects pointers to those objects when they occur in other objects.

Ideally your base entity class will declare a virtual function called something like:



Then each of your derived classes will implement this appropriately, for example:



ArchiveData should be some kind of stream object, whose << and >> operators are overloaded to read/write data to the stream.

Whenever your serialization format changes for that object, you increment version, and change the loading code to match the new structure.

When saving (or loading), you can simply call Serialize on whichever root object contains your game data, and any objects it points to will hierarchically get serialized out/in, too.

Note that this is just one way of doing it - the one that I'm familiar with. There might be other (better) ways of approaching the problem.

Hope that helps! :)

Thanks for the replies so far guys/gals!
Mattdev: I did a little research on Serializing, and it looks like that might be the way to go. This part of my project is still a little ways down the road, but I want to start brain storming ideas now and doing research.

Anyone know if this is the common way to save games?

Thanks!
Jeff