I am a little stumped on the best approach for this, I want to clean up my code a bit and move my entity components to an external file that is loaded in at runtime.
However I am a little unsure how to go about this, as I have never done any extensive I/O coding, I usually just write the code once and when I am happy with it, dump the entire thing to disk using Protobuf or Json and then read it in later.
I would like it to be somewhat readable though, so that if I want to make small changes (like balancing) down the road, I don’t have to re-write it and redump it.
I am using the Ashley Entity Framework which is fairly lightweight, along with LibGDX and Box2D. I have it setup so that entities bodies and fixtures are not created until they are added to the Ashley engine, so there is no serializing of actual Box2D bodies; which is nice.
Serializing sprites is bad though, correct? So my option there would be to store the file path and instead grab it from the AssetManager after the entity has been loaded from disk.
Any ideas? Suggestions?, for the record, playable characters (of which there are currently 5) have between 15 and 20 different component combinations that make them unique.
The main idea here is to remove a lot of horrible code into a nice file that is readable and can be altered.