Unite 2016 - Best Practices in Persisting Player Data on Mobile

There are many options available to Unity developers when it comes to player data persistence, or saving & loading. In this session, we will cover what many of those options are, their tradeoffs, and some advanced techniques / best practices in saving your players data. Kevin Messenhimer - Fiveamp
Chris Lewis - Fiveamp

[victorleung]

9:26 json workflow
17:05 hash workflow
20:19 timing for saving data to disk

[Maskedmous]

Everytime you see some saving / loading practices you come across the Binary Formatter. However, none of them say that the binary formatter is NOT SAFE. You can edit it and add all kinds of unsafe things that your application will happily deserialize and execute. It's a security issue which Microsoft also documents that it isn't safe.

[diegocrusius]

I would like to add that for a simple single player game letting the player hack your game can be a good thing.

People have fun playing games in different ways, and by letting the player hack your game you are essentially offering him new ways to interact with your game. Kinda reminds me the old vintage games and their cheat codes.

[purpleAiPEy]

:O this is perfect. An unanswered roadblock of mine finally addressed in a complete way :D

[antoinelam]

Be careful what they saying about Binary Format this is kind of false, they did not say how they built it. Binary is the lighter format, way lighter than JSON or XML (a lot). And you can keep flexibility using binary format with a simple data encapsulation pattern. But its a good video :)

[yudnai]

So what happened is that everyone made different tools for reading json files with unity and now its hard to get it straight.
I WISH UNITY WILL BE MORE RESPONSIBLE ON IT
create a utility that can do it and that's it.
like list for urls to reads the files
the var that will be there
window to put the data for them
and the a box to parse it to other list that can be use in your scripts
without doing all the under the hood scripting in many variations its frustrating.
and MAKE IT WORK WITH WEBGL builds

[CezarWagenheimer]

C# code to reach internal path!

Please give more info on this! A have Android Users with Save Errors because of PersistentDataPath not readable by some unknown reason.

[Maskedmous]

would've been nice if Unity had a way of taking a snapshot and restoring that snapshot. But I guess that's not really possible.