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

[Jeffrey Kesselman]

On Thu, Feb 5, 2009 at 11:01 AM, Tiago <tiago.matias at gmail.com> wrote:
>> 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...


If you dont want to use a pre-built solution, have considered using a
real RDBMS like mysql?

Not that hard to use really (at least from Java thanks to JDBC) and very
very flexible.