itch.io

it happened out of the blue: there was just a sudden surge in downloads and I even had to follow the url referrals to find out why
but alas the download count is back to normal now .. my 15 minutes of fame is over 😔

anyway..
I guess my method of making the save files is a bit unorthodox :
- every actor in the game is derived from a single base class
- each actor has an unique id
- they use this to refer to each other instead of pointers (a big hash map is used to pair id and actor pointers)
- this saves me a lot of trouble: actors can refer to each other without smart pointers and pointers don't need to be turned to handles during saving
- one problem though is that there are about 400 different actor classes (it's a mess)
- when you load a game you need to figure out which object class need to be recreated
- for this the class name is saved (there is a handy function called "typeid" to extract this)
- and to ease the pain of creating an object factory I abuse a C/C++ feature where you can set
a variable using a function (with macro magic each actor has a seperate function to create itself - a pointer to this function is registered into a list of character array at the very start - of course this is not a good practice and it's a big hack but works great)
- for saving everything is stored in a giant xml file:
   -  this has the advantage that the order of variables doesn't matter
    (if I add new variables later in patches I don't necessarily break old saves)
  - and also I can use the save files for debugging (e.g. to test if saving is correct I can reload the save - save it again and compare the save files)
  - the disadvantage is that it's slightly slower than storing them in binary
  (also they can be hacked very easily - but I don't mind that)
- they also have a somewhat big file size and stored in a compressed form
- there is also extra data stored at the start for the save menu to know the date and map name
but in hindsight this info should have been stored in a seperate file (like the screenshots)
 also I guess compressing them is a bit of an overkill (there is not much space saved approx 1.5mb  files  compresed down to 150kb  size)
- for maps only the name of the map is stored - to save space - but this means if I update a map I potentially break saves

- and of course there is a seperate file to store which map was reached for level select - but this is just a single value

sorry for the wall of text - I don't really have idea how to illustrate this - it's mostly code related stuff