Saving system

I have been thinking about and preparing how to make the saving system for the game right from the start. Now the individual pieces can finally be connected and tested. This system allows me to do the scene transitions seen in the previous post and the saving of the game seen in this video. In the video I set courses for the ships and make new blueprints and save to see that things are loaded correctly. For debugging purposes I save the state of the game into binary and JSON. JSON so that human can inspect it easily and binary because that’s what I’m going to really use in the end. Every time the game loads it loads both files and checks that everything matches.

I like to make only a few prefabs for the UI objects and then use them in different places and customize them via code instead of the inspector. This way only a small number of UI objects have to be maintained, it is not always fun to fiddle with those. For example the saving and loading panels are actually the same panel, but opening it up from different places assigns different functions for the save/load-panel and shows and hides different buttons.