Strangely Consistent

Theory, practice, and languages, braided together

July 7 2012 — saving and restoring

I'm a bit extremely tired today. So I'll make this a quick one, because it's really easy anyway.

Today we're implementing save/restore functionality, so saving in the clearing and then restoring from somewhere else takes you back from the clearing.

$ bin/crypt 
CRYPT
=====

You've heard there's supposed to be an ancient hidden crypt in these
woods. One containing a priceless treasure. Well, there's only one way
to find out...

Clearing

The forest road stops here, and the gaps between the trees widen into a
patch of un-forest. The sky above is clear apart from a few harmless clouds.

> save
Game saved.

> east
Hill

A flat, broad hill interrupts the dense-ish forest here. Only grass and
small bushes grow on the hill.

> in
Chamber

This is a cramped space just inside the hidden opening in the hill. The
sun gets in enough to illuminate the place. There are some scribblings on
the wall.

> restore
Clearing
The forest road stops here, and the gaps between the trees widen into a
patch of un-forest. The sky above is clear apart from a few harmless clouds.

> quit

Saving and restoring is usually a pain in games, because you have to capture all the game state and serialize it somehow. Since we're doing everything with events, our job is easier. We just save all the events, put them somewhere, and when we want to restore the game, we apply all the saved events on a fresh game engine.

(I didn't choose to save to file here, so a save doesn't persist between program runs. However, it's the principle I want to show here, and messing with files would mostly just hide the interesting bits.)

It's very important in an adventure game that when you restore you're not left with extra items or lingering state somehow. This cannot happen in our factoring, because everything is flushed and re-created from the event stream. The game is literally replayed behind the scenes to the point where you saved.

And there we are. Good night. :-)