December 2015
Intermediate to advanced
384 pages
12h 30m
English
To transmit objects between networked instances of a multiplayer game, the game must format the data for those objects such that it can be sent by a transport layer protocol. This chapter discusses the need for and uses of a robust serialization system. It explores ways to handle the issues of self-referential data, compression, and easily maintainable code, while working within the runtime performance requirements of a real-time simulation.
Serialization refers to the act of converting an object from its random access format in memory into a linear series of bits. These bits can be stored on disk or sent across a network and later restored to their original format. Assume that in the ...
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