[MUD-Dev2] Persisting a MUD state with plain binary serialization

[Chris White]

I've used binary XML trees on a commercial MMO I worked on.  Each 
persistent object type had at most 20 nodes or so, so it wasn't a big 
hit to have to save the entire tree any time one of the nodes changed.  
My only real regret about the system was that it was kindof awkward to 
convert from the binary XML to human readable XML, which made it harder 
to debug.  If this is just a hobby project, the path of least resistance 
is probably just to use XML.  There are tons of freely available 
utilities and you're unlikely to need super high performance out of a 
hobby MUD server.

Tiago wrote:
> Hello all!
>
> I'm building a (classical) MUD server as hobby. I would like to have a fully
> persistent game state and thought of using simple serialization to dump the
> entire object graph to disk periodically.
>
> Thing is, binary serialization has a few drawbacks, in terms of versioning
> and it's a pain to control which parts of the graph are serialized or not
> (it's perfect to serialize everything tough).
>
> So, I would like to hear if someone here has had any (bad) experiences with
> serialization (applied to this particular domain) and if they recommend it
> or not.
>
> Thanks!
>
> tiago matias
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