Bold of you to assume the data in save files is packed binary and not something like JSON where { "x": 13872, "y": -17312, "z": -20170 } requires 40 bytes of storage.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Agreed. JSON solves:

the 'versioning' problem, where the data fields change after an update. That's a nightmare on packed binary; need to write so much code to handle it.
makes debugging persistence issues easy for developers
very fast libraries exist for reading and writing it
actually compresses pretty damn well; you can pass the compress + write to a background thread once you've done the fast serialisation, anyway.

For saving games, JSON+gzip is such a good combination that I'd probably never consider anything else.

[–] cactusupyourbutt 3 points 5 months ago

protobuf does all of these (well, except compression which you dont need)

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago (2 children)

That's excusable in My First Game™ but surely professional AAAAA game would never cut corners and code something so lazily, eh?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 months ago (1 children)

It's not really laziness. Storing as JSON solves or prevents a lot of problems you could run into with something bespoke and "optimally packed", you just have the tradeoff of needing more storage for it. Even then, the increased storage can be largely mitigated with compression. JSON compresses very well.

The problem is usually what they're storing, not how they're storing it. For example, The Witcher (first one) has ~20MB save files. These are mostly a bespoke packed binary format, but contain things like raw strings of descriptions in multiple localisations for items being carried, and complete descriptors of game quests. Things that should just be ID values that point to that data in the game files. It also leads with like... 13KB of zero-padding for some reason.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago

Good points!

[–] cactusupyourbutt 1 points 5 months ago

looking at you x3

and rimworld