Announcing DataStore v2.0 - Automatic Versioning, Data Tagging, & Listing!

[Tomarty]

@DataBrain

I’ll be honest—how do any of these new features provide tools that weren’t already possibly to use with the “v1” version of data stores? I already track the version of my data and run migrations as the player joins the game.

Supporting migration code can be a pain point for long-term projects. I have hundreds of lines of legacy deserialization code that I still need to upkeep; Most of it is over 5 years old.

We need DataStore data migration support!

I’ve been developing my game Shard Seekers full time since late 2015. One thing that’s been worrying me more and more over the years is the fact that I need to support my game’s current binary format forever. I need to be able to experiment with new systems / features without committing to them forever for my game to succeed long term; I’m just too hesitant to add new types of content to my game because of this. Some way to iterate over millions of DataStore keys and process them would be a rel…

I felt clever implementing an extremely compact save format for inventory data that encodes using the inventory’s length, but now I need to pass the length of the legacy global inventory when deserializing characters so that I can properly skip the old equipment data.

What are you working on currently? (2020)

I’m working on a new inventory data format for Shard Seekers. When an equipment slot references an item in the inventory it will use the inventory length to encode the item’s position in an optimal number of bits. Powers of two are stored normally at their bit depth: [image] This is better than when it didn’t know the max, but here’s what it can do for other cases: [image] [image] It omits redundant bits so that every possible state is meaningful. If the inventory has just 1 item in it, i…

I’m okay with keeping old code like this around for a while, years even, but it’s a huge relief to know that I don’t need to support it forever.