[Adonthell-devel] new save/load mechanism

[Kai Sterker]

As suggested in my earlier mail, I have written a new mechanism to 
load/save data in a better way. Main reason is to ensure better 
compatibility across versions.

The implementation turned out a little different as suggested: there's 
the class flat that contaions the basic functionality: flattening all 
the data into a single buffer and retrieving it again from the buffer. 
On top of that sits diskio, which adds methods to save and load that 
buffer to/from a gzstream.

That means for one we can keep our put_state/get_state methods, which 
take gzstrream as argument. However, internally, the data is first put 
into the diskio container, which is then saved to disk. When loading, 
that container is restored from file first and the data can then be 
retreived from it.

Later on, we could easily write a netio class that can transfer the 
flattened data over a network.

There is also a little test program called diskiotest that demonstrates 
the functionality.

Hope that thing proves to be helpful!

Kai