Serializing
Whenever things have to be saved and loaded again (e.g. sending a map from the server to the clients), people talk about “serialization - Basically, this means breaking a complex structure (like our block world) down to a simple row of data.
“Cubes supports bit-serializing - You can export your block terrain at any time to a row of bits, most of the time handled as byte[] array. Later, the complete terrain can be reconstructed by those raw bytes.
Serializing
So, how do we convert a complete block world to bytes?
byte[] serializedTerrainData = CubesSerializer.writeToBytes(blockTerrain);Well… That was pretty easy, or? You don’t have to worry, how your terrain is magically pressed in the data, the framework directly offers you the bytes, that you need to reconstruct the whole thing.
Data Transport
Actually, this part is on your own - There are many ways how to get data from one place to another and they all depend on your application. You’ll have to find out how to get those bytes to the place where you want to rebuild the terrain - Make sure, you read the possible scenarios listed below.
Unserializing
At this point, you have successfully received the bytes and want to recreate your awesome block world - This is how you do it:
//The old blockTerrain will be completely replaced!
//(Even the chunks count will be adjusted)
BlockTerrainControl blockTerrainClone = new BlockTerrainControl(new Vector3Int());
CubesSerializer.readFromBytes(blockTerrain, serializedTerrainData);This screenshot shows a terrain and it’s unserialized clone - Note, that the blocks have to be registered in the same order on both sides in order to reproduce the same terrain!
Possible scenarios
The most typical examples for serializing are the following:
| Application | Data Transport | Resources |
|---|---|---|
Networking |
The bytes are sent in a message over the network - The client receives them and can rebuild the block world. |
|
Files |
The bytes are saved in a file, which can be loaded again next time. |
Advanced: BitSerializing
This part of the article will handle a more advanced way of how to access the bit serializer of the framework. As long as it’s not written yet, please take a look at the classes cubes.network.BitInputStream, cubes.network.BitOutputStream and the interface cubes.network.BitSerializable that’s implemented by the cubes.BlockTerrainControl class.