CODEWITHSUNDEEP
javaandroidsavepickle
cody
cody

Reputation: 755

Saving a game (Android app.)

This is somewhat of an open question.

I'm in the process of developing a simple game for android and I've gotten to the point where I'm trying to enable thee user to save their progress and return later.

As i'm a beginner, I'm not exactly sure where to start, so I was hoping some of you might have at least some suggestions.

A little info on the setup of the game:

All animation is done in a thread through a canvas and alternation of stored bitmap frames based on a 30 ms loop.

Everything is an object, the characters, the background is simply a 2d array of objects. and each object is generally referenced and created dynamically through a hashmap.

Now how to save? I know I could brute force it, and simply save coordinates and current actions blah blah etc. etc. for each object in each map.

But is there a better way to do this? I've briefly read that in python there's a method of sterilizing objects called "pickle," and there is something similar called "kryo." Am I looking in the right direction?

Upvotes: 2

Views: 827

Answers (2)

Guillaume
Guillaume

Reputation: 22822

You should look into Java serialization. It's not perfect, it has problems, but it's the safest, quickest way to turn a complex tree of objects into something that you can save to a file or a db, and load it back when you need.

Else, there's always the possibility to use your own specific serialization using INSERT SQL queries, etc. But be very careful, it's easy to miss parts of what you want to save / restore. One example of that would be to turn your objects tree into XML and save that XML as a file. There are very good 3rd-party libs to map objects to XML and back in Java.

Upvotes: 2

moongoal
moongoal

Reputation: 2956

Well.. That's not STERILIZATION, but SERIALIZATION.. Which is a programming technique. And serialization is also the technique you want to use.

Doesn't matter if you use a predefined method or something you write on your own, but the only thing that matters is to loop across the objects and write to the file (or saving structure) the date you need to be later reloaded.

Anyway yes, you're looking the right way.

The best way to do it is implementing a serialization interface. Each object for which the serialize() method is called must save it's data and then call the serialize() method for each child object it owns.

Upvotes: 0

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