Savegames, revisited…

The savegames on Gateway are taking a bit too long to execute (about 2 secs)… This is not a big issue, but it causes some stalls before and after a cutscene, and I dislike it…

Besides, the first save I save, it takes 2 seconds, but the second (and the rest) takes 9 seconds, which is super-weird… Since I had already planned to switch over to binary files, I’m going to switch first and see if the problem goes away or not…

The current savegame system uses XML to store (because I can edit it by hand and play around with it), so it had a really loose structure, but now I need to make it more rigid, so it can load/save faster and in a platform independent way…

First step was creating a data buffer that could resize at will…

I had such a buffer class in other projects, just had to cannibalize it… Why not std::vector<char>? Well, my main reason is historical… I never got used to using that in the past because using them in debug mode is so slow (I can turn it off, but in Visual Studio this leads to such head aches combined with other libraries, that I kind of gave up on it), and this way I can add functions to handle indieness in the future if I want…

Still, on my next project, I should definitely look into boost… Everybody uses it anyway…

Now listening to “Murder_4_Hire” by “Body Count”