Binary Serialization

If you find your JSON files growing too large, you can store data as a binary blob instead. This works with anything that serializes to JSON.

Creating a binary blob

Here's a snippet with a game resource that stores a list of positions in a companion binary blob while the rest is in clear JSON.

// Custom Asset that will serialize MyBinaryBlob as binary data
[AssetType( Name = "My CustomResource", Extension = "res", Category = "other" )]
public partial class CustomResource : GameResource
{
	public string Title { get; set; }

	public MyBigData Data = new();
}

// This will be stored as binary data according to Serialize & Deserialize method
public class MyBigData : BlobData
{
	public List<float> Data { get; set; } = [];

	public override void Serialize( ref Writer writer )
    {
		// This layout will be what we will be deserializing, plan accordingly
		writer.Stream.Write( Data.Count ); // int
		
		foreach ( var instance in Data )
		{
			writer.Stream.Write( instance );
		}
	}

	public override void Deserialize( ref Reader reader )
    {

		var instanceCount = reader.Stream.Read<int>(); // Int

		for ( int i = 0; i < instanceCount; i++ )
        {
			Data.Add( reader.Stream.Read<float>() );
		}
	}
}

Considerations

Working with binary files requires a bit more planning as it is not human readable. For example, deserializing a dynamic list is done by writing the size first so that we know how many elements to skip or read. Just like in the example above.