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Learning C# by Developing Games with Unity

You're reading from   Learning C# by Developing Games with Unity Get to grips with coding in C# and build simple 3D games in Unity 2023 from the ground up

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Product type Paperback
Published in Nov 2022
Publisher Packt
ISBN-13 9781837636877
Length 466 pages
Edition 7th Edition
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Author (1):
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Harrison Ferrone Harrison Ferrone
Author Profile Icon Harrison Ferrone
Harrison Ferrone
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Table of Contents (18) Chapters Close

Preface 1. Getting to Know Your Environment FREE CHAPTER 2. The Building Blocks of Programming 3. Diving into Variables, Types, and Methods 4. Control Flow and Collection Types 5. Working with Classes, Structs, and OOP 6. Getting Your Hands Dirty with Unity 7. Movement, Camera Controls, and Collisions 8. Scripting Game Mechanics 9. Basic AI and Enemy Behavior 10. Revisiting Types, Methods, and Classes 11. Specialized Collection Types and LINQ 12. Saving, Loading, and Serializing Data 13. Exploring Generics, Delegates, and Beyond 14. The Journey Continues 15. Pop Quiz Answers
16. Other Books You May Enjoy
17. Index

Serializing data

When we talk about serializing and deserializing data, what we’re really talking about is translation. While we’ve been translating our text and XML piecemeal in previous sections, being able to take an entire object and translate it in one shot is a great tool to have.

By definition:

  • The act of serializing an object translates the object’s entire state into another format
  • The act of deserializing is the reverse, taking the data from a file and restoring it to its former object state

Figure 12.17: Example of serializing an object into XML and JSON

Let’s take a practical example from the above image—an instance of our Weapon class. Each weapon has its own name and damage properties and associated values, which is called its state. The state of an object is unique, which allows the program to tell them apart.

An object’s state also includes properties or fields that are reference types...

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