Runtime serialization on Unity3D. Development of a serialization toolset

Abstract

The lack of Unity3D runtime serialization support made me research what solutions other teams were using to achieve what we wanted. I found tons of serialization solutions out there developed by third-parties, but none of them fit our needs for Tactical Heroes, the mobile game I’ve been working on for almost two years now at eRepublik Labs. After some time using others’ solutions, I found we were using tools that weren’t giving results we were comfortable with. So, I decided to develop a robust set of tools and libraries to help any Unity3D user to handle runtime serialization, and carry the process as comfortable as possible. The APIs are cleverly designed to fit Unity3D ones. They’re extensible and nonintrusive, made to be easily implemented on every project that demands runtime serialization. And the system don’t rely on an specific serialization format or language, but instead gives you the choice of implement your own language parsers and writers on top. Those are the key features of the tool I’m going to talk about in this paper, a tool codenamed as Abaddon.