Serialization approach

[SlashScreen]

What would be the best approach to serializing a registry, to save it as a scene?

[felipeasimos]

The way I did it a while back: go through each component type and iterate over every value of it in the registry (entityIterator in a view). If the component is just an empty struct, just save a list of every entity ID that has it. If it isn't, you would need to have something like a list of structs, where each item has a data field with the actual component values and an id field with the entity ID. This is pretty comptime heavy btw: you need to create the types of the lists and have a comptime list of component types in the first place.

For deserializing: keep track of entities in the file with a hashmap that map then to newly created entities. Iterate over the component type lists. If you stumble upon an ID you haven't seen yet, just create a new one and map it to the hashmap, otherwise just use what you already have.

Using comptime you can just have a list where you declare or expose the components and construct the component type list from it.

Ideally, this kind of thing could be done by this repo, but currently we don't have a way to get the component types at comptime (this could be done by enforcing the user to provide it explicitly in the future though)