save an entire game (a bunch of objects) without saving each object individually?

[iliketomakestuff]

I know that I can manually go through every object and save them all, but is there a way to encapsulate and entire object, and everything that was created IN that object and save it all as 1 chunk of data?
or is that a horrible way to go about it?

I just can't imagine how nasty the code would be for me to record every individual piece of info that I'll need to save the game state fully..

Any ideas would be greatly appreciated!!
Thanks

[smasher]

Unfortunately, cocoa doesn't know which variables in your custom classes are important, and which are calculated or temporary. You need to code the methods for NSCoder so that the right variables get saved.

The good news is that if your custom objects conform to the NSCoder protocol, it's easy to use NSKeyedArchiver to save it to disk. You don't have to write your own code to write every variable to disk.

The Archives and Serializations Programming Guide should help
Archives and Serializations Programming Guide for Cocoa: Introduction

[iliketomakestuff]

Originally Posted by smasher

Unfortunately, cocoa doesn't know which variables in your custom classes are important, and which are calculated or temporary. You need to code the methods for NSCoder so that the right variables get saved.

The good news is that if your custom objects conform to the NSCoder protocol, it's easy to use NSKeyedArchiver to save it to disk. You don't have to write your own code to write every variable to disk.

The Archives and Serializations Programming Guide should help
Archives and Serializations Programming Guide for Cocoa: Introduction

sweet! thanks for answer! I don't know anything about NSCoder or NSKeyedArchiver, so I'll have to do some reading