Update

Hey Steemers,

I don't know if anyone is anticipating the next installment about serialization; I do have it planned but I'm going to have to temporarily halt it for the moment.

Currently, as I've mentioned in a previous blog post I'm contributing to a casual game that some of my friends and former colleagues have been working on, so that has been taking some of my time. Nodes, graphs, adjacency lists / matrices, editor... yeah, fun stuff! :)

Additionally, the serialization stuff that I am going through right now in these posts are part of a much larger framework that I have developed for my own work with a colleague. We use that framework for all of our prototypes and what we could call our "past prototype, but not quite production yet" IP's.

Yesterday my colleague and I decided to chop our framework and tools up and sell each of them separately on the Asset Store. No actual gameplay stuff, just the generic systems, editors and tools - but a lot of them, including the serialization system. In fact, the serialization system is in the approval process as I write this.

That's why there hasn't been another post about serialization yet. Now if we post something we have to make sure we are not violating any terms of selling a product on the Asset Store under the Asset Store license if we provide the same or similar code in a set of tutorials.

The people I work with as well as myself feel strongly about earning something for our work, but we also feel strongly that we have a responsibility to teach what we have learned in school and on the job for the next generation - and making it accessible to those who may not otherwise have a means to that knowledge. Once we get clarification on the terms we'll move forward again (or not, depending on the terms).

Worst case scenario is that I just do generic tutorials like stuff on data structures and algorithms instead. There is a growing group of programmers both in game development as well as other areas that are providing some awesome content on Steemit that may not be as legally bound as I may be in few days. Besides, I have been getting the itch to expand back out into more areas than just game development and programming with respect to my posts.

So, we're going to have to shelve the serialization stuff at least temporarily for the moment, just to make sure we're honoring our agreements. There is a lot of interesting generic stuff to cover though in the realm of programming, so I'll give it some thought and pick something.

As always, thanks for reading and my apologies for the shelving of the serialization tutorial.