Automatic ScriptabeObject state saving and restoring container for Unity3D

Supports saving into PlayerPrefs, JSON file, binary file or AES-encrypted file.

Status: Functionally borked, due to the difficulty of getting hold of persistent asset IDs in Unity. I'm short on time these days, but will try to work out a decent solution. Besides that the persistence mechanism modules should be stable.

This is a tiny submodule I developed for my own projects. New addition, still under development. But if you find it useful, feel free to use it for any purpose.

This container persists and restores its content transparently, which means you don't have to call any save or load methods:

Automatic state save: The states of the selected ScriptableObjects are automatically serialized and stored through the selected persistence mechanism. Happens when OnDestroy() is triggered on the container.
Automating state restore: The state is automatically restored when the persistent container is instantiated. Happens when Awake() is triggered on the container.

(But optionally you can disable this automatic save and restore, and call the publicly exposed simple SaveData() and LoadData() methods on the PersistentContainer instance.)

The persistence mechanism mentioned above is essentially a ScriptableObject-based pluggable component you can drag into the appropriate slot on the PersistentContainer. This component determines how and where the state of your ScriptableObjects will be saved.

Interface

Simple example use with granular, single-variable ScriptableObjects. See Unity3D-ReactiveScriptables for more information on this approach. You can use it with traditional, large state ScriptableObjects too.

Usage

Create a container: Add the PersistentContainer component to a GameObject in your scene (for example to the object responsible for scene management, or an object marked with DontDestroyOnLoad).
Create a persistence mechanism: Create a PersistenceMechanism by right clicking in the project tree, selecting Create > Persistence Mechanisms, then one of the available mechanisms:
Set a filename (optional): If you created a file-based persistence mechanism, you can specify the filename to use on the Inspector pane of the persistence mechanism itself.
Fill the container: Drag the ScriptableObjects you want to save into the Persistence List array of the PersistentContainer component.

Current problem

The unique and persistent identification of instances is currently broken.

Initially, like a proper moron, I used GetInstanceId() on the ScriptableObject instances to get hold of a unique identifier. I assumed this is the equivalent of the persistent GUIDs Unity uses for assets – but nope, the InstanceId is in fact not guaranteed to be persistent.

I spent some time researching solutions to actually get the GUIDs (at runtime), but to my surprise there appears to be none. So I temporarily refactored the container to use the type and instance name of the ScriptableObjects, which is just horrid, since even renaming them breaks the persistence.

I really want to keep the container universal, i.e. not requiring any sort of special ID field to be implemented on the contained objects.

Implementation details

Fail-safe against data loss

I made some efforts to add a fail-safe against potential data loss: The persistence system does not delete orphaned saved data; it continues to store it.

What this means is that if you remove an item from the container, or an item gets detached from the saved state for any reason (e.g. identification breaks), the container will continue to store the previously saved data of the item. If you put the item back (with identification intact), the container will resume loading the state for it.

I don't know what would be the best way to granularly handle these orphaned data; what I know is that I'll implement at least a Purge() method to clear the storage.

Other notes

You can also transform stored state from one format to another if you replace the persistence mechanism while the data is already loaded, and you execute a save.

The system is not exactly optimized for handling large amounts of data, since it keeps stuff in memory, but I'll push it into that direction to cover these usage scenarios too.

Oh yes, the AES-128 encryption is sort of a lazy implementation. The key is generated from a string key that the container itself provides for the persistence mechanism; it's always the same key (per container). And the IV is prepended in cleartext to the written encrypted data (but that's actually fine).

baratgabor / Unity3D-ScriptableObjectPersistor