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

[Tiago]

> Tiago wrote:
>
> Not sure what you mean by "binary serialization."  Just copying out of
> memory won't work as I'm sure you're aware.
>


Well, by binary serialization, I was in fact refering to a facility
whithin.NET apps that simplify dumping an entire object graph do disk.
My biggestinterest in this was just the simplicity it offers. Just
callSerialize(World, filestream) and it's done.

Problem is, like you might imagine, it's all or nothing. Anything
besidesthat very easily becomes a pain to implement. Another problem is
theversioning and upgrades (like you said). It effectively renders
datamigrations almost impossible.

I'm considering manually serializing to XML some big game blocks like,
themap, the players, the mob's and the positions of these things in the
world.Then it would just be a matter of fixing the references as these
things aredeserialized back from the disk into memory

The generated XML would obviously be human readable and writable and
wouldmake upgrading possible.

Disadvantes: A lot more to code when what I would really want to be
doingwas programming MOB behaviour...