AI War 2:Serialization Gates

This whole page is aimed almost more at developers than modders, but it's important to know for both to a certain extent.

All of the data in the savegame files, profiles, input files, and settings files are stored as a continuous stream of ints, floats, fints (fixed-ints), bools, and strings. It's imperative that the data be read out exactly as it was written in, or else the whole thing falls apart. We don't have tags in there saying what field is what, because the amount of data is too massive for that. So if you switch reading int 1 and int 2, there's no protection against that.

So! Thankfully, we've made it really easy to simply mimic reads and writes, in well-ordered serialization and deserialization methods. So long as those look okay at the start and a test save and load functions, all is well. (Unless data is really nested, and not present, as the one exception.)

The big question, of course, is what if you need to add a field or remove a field? Wouldn't that break all savegames? That's where serialization gates come in.