[iliketrains]

Re serialization: We have custom binary serialization that essentially dumps the game state into a binary stream. No allocations, no copies, no conversions. Our saves can be big, >100 MB uncompressed, so there is no room for waste.

The big advantage is that it reads data directly from game's classes, so there is no boilerplate needed, no prorobufs, no schema. And it supports versioning, adding or removing members mostly without limitations.

I think it's a cool system, maybe I should write a blog post about it :)