How do I implement Unreal-like object serialization?

Posted by MrWiggels on Game Development See other posts from Game Development or by MrWiggels
Published on 2012-10-18T20:41:52Z Indexed on 2012/10/18 23:18 UTC
Read the original article Hit count: 262

Filed under:

c#

|

serialization

Recently, I've been working on the core of my engine, and as I'm moving forward I find myself developing throwaway code to read files and simple data into the engine. This got me thinking about how I should implement a file management system.

After a bit of googleing I came across the Unreal Package format, and boy does it look like the perfect one.

I think it's good because the way how it allows you to separate different assets into different packages and allow something like a level to reference the different packages.

I was just wondering, is this possible with C#? Because the built-in serialization API in .NET does not seem to support any form of this, only reading and writing to a single file.

© Game Development or respective owner

Related posts about c#

.NET WebRequest.PreAuthenticate not quite what it sounds like

as seen on West-Wind - Search for 'West-Wind'
I’ve run into the problem a few times now: How to pre-authenticate .NET WebRequest calls doing an HTTP call to the server – essentially send authentication credentials on the very first request instead of waiting for a server challenge first? At first glance this sound like it should be easy:… >>> More
HttpWebRequest and Ignoring SSL Certificate Errors

as seen on West-Wind - Search for 'West-Wind'
Man I can't believe this. I'm still mucking around with OFX servers and it drives me absolutely crazy how some these servers are just so unbelievably misconfigured. I've recently hit three different 3 major brokerages which fail HTTP validation with bad or corrupt certificates at least according to… >>> More
The dynamic Type in C# Simplifies COM Member Access from Visual FoxPro

as seen on West-Wind - Search for 'West-Wind'
I’ve written quite a bit about Visual FoxPro interoperating with .NET in the past both for ASP.NET interacting with Visual FoxPro COM objects as well as Visual FoxPro calling into .NET code via COM Interop. COM Interop with Visual FoxPro has a number of problems but one of them at least got a lot… >>> More
Dynamic Type to do away with Reflection

as seen on West-Wind - Search for 'West-Wind'
The dynamic type in C# 4.0 is a welcome addition to the language. One thing I’ve been doing a lot with it is to remove explicit Reflection code that’s often necessary when you ‘dynamically’ need to walk and object hierarchy. In the past I’ve had a number of ReflectionUtils that used string based expressions… >>> More
Finding a Relative Path in .NET

as seen on West-Wind - Search for 'West-Wind'
Here’s a nice and simple path utility that I’ve needed in a number of applications: I need to find a relative path based on a base path. So if I’m working in a folder called c:\temp\templates\ and I want to find a relative path for c:\temp\templates\subdir\test.txt I want to receive back subdir\test… >>> More

Related posts about serialization

XML Serialization and Soap Serialization

as seen on Stack Overflow - Search for 'Stack Overflow'
Hi I think even if we will not need interoperability between applications, and even we do not communicate with web services, it is easier to serialize using SoapFormatter than XmlSerializer because SOAP will serialize the private members by default, while XmlSerializer will work on public properties… >>> More
Binary serialization/de-serialization in C++ and C#

as seen on Stack Overflow - Search for 'Stack Overflow'
Hello. I am working on a distributed application which has two components. One is written in standard C++ (not managed C++) and the other one is written in C#. Both are communicating via a message bus. I have a situation in which I need to pass objects from C++ to C# application and for this I need… >>> More
Insert some data at later point once serialization(binary serialization) is done for a class

as seen on Stack Overflow - Search for 'Stack Overflow'
My application is written in C# and I am a newbie to C#. I am facing with a problem during serialization. The problem is as follows. There are many classes in my project and when serialization is called on one of the main class object it serializes itself and during this process many of the member… >>> More
FormatException with IsolatedStorageSettings

as seen on Stack Overflow - Search for 'Stack Overflow'
I have a problem when serializing a Dictionary<string,Person> to IsolatedStorageSettings. I'm doing the following: public Dictionary<string, Person> Names = new Dictionary<string, Person>(); if (!IsolatedStorageSettings.ApplicationSettings.Contains("Names")) { … >>> More
Serialization of Queue type- Serialization not working; C#

as seen on Stack Overflow - Search for 'Stack Overflow'
Hi All, Consider this piece of code: private Queue Date=new Queue(); //other declarations public DateTime _Date { get { return (DateTime)Date.Peek();} set { Date.Enqueue(value); } } //other properties and stuff.... public void UpdatePosition(...) { //other code … >>> More