Game world serialization

[tjheldna]

Hi All,

 

I'm looking at serializing the current game state for saving and loading. My first question is...

 

Do entity's that are added/removed from the world editor have some sort of unique id assigned to them that I can access?

 

I noticed that the entity "name" field is unique and increments as you drag them in the world, however this could easily be trouble with duplicate names due to copy/paste and user error. That dosen't seem like a robust solution to use the name for its unique identifier.

 

So what I plan to do is loop through all objects in the world match the id's; if its of a certain type then call its load/save function as required.

 

Maybe is there a better way of doing this task?

 

Cheers!

[Pixel Perfect]

Nothing to stop you assigning your own unique IDs as you can simply loop through the level objects children assigning them to a new key value. You probably already loop through them in order to create internal game objects so there is no additional overhead really. As these are static then this should always be repeatable.

 

With a base class that all dynamic object classes are derived from containing the ID and a set of virtual functions for loading and saving; each derived class can have its own save load functions which can save/overwrite key data for the restored level.

 

 

[Josh]

I would use the pointer to the object as the ID. That's guaranteed to be unique.

[tjheldna]

Thats awesome guys Thanks!!