Feature: 'A Templated C++ Attribute Library for Object Persistence and Export'

In this in-depth technical piece, coding veteran McNickle explains how experience on the Deer Hunter series led him to create a library for managing and exporting important variables. During Deer Hunter 2003's development, McNickle found himself having to explain a reoccurring bug and the process needed to correct it whenever a new programmer would come across it: "Essentially, any time a new variable was added to the base actor class or one of its derived classes, the programmer had to manually add support in the archiving routines to persist this data. The problem was further complicated because it was not desirable to serialize all variables during a saved game, and the logic determining which variables should be serialized when was poorly understood. Questions such as 'Should the variable be saved during a saved game?', 'Should it be serialized to the network stream?' and 'Is the variable state managed by the server, or is it client authoritative?' had to be answered. They were typically understood at the time the variable was added, but when being reviewed by another programmer, the answers to these questions had to be re-discovered." Frustrated with having to repeatedly fix the problem and seeking to develop an elegant, automated, and less error-prone solution, McNickle envisioned a system fulfilling a list of specific requirements:

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