Comment on Gog will delete cloud saves more than 200MB per game after August 31st

• addie@feddit.uk ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  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.

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  • cactusupyourbutt@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

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

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• smeg@feddit.uk ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

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

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  • vithigar@lemmy.ca ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    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.

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    • smeg@feddit.uk ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Good points!

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  • cactusupyourbutt@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    looking at you x3

    and rimworld

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