Delta State Algorithm Creation Series

Delta State Algorithm Motivation

This post will act as the table of contents for an algorithm I'm developing for calculating deltas between state for generic sets of data.

I figured this would be an interesting series to write about so I can document my thought process, trials, errors, and successes. At the end of this I plan to share working code that implements this algorithm so that you can use it in your own work.

Now that I've been not diving more into Unity3D development for my hobby programming, I'm getting to a point in game development where I need to manage state for data in a way that allows patches of state to be applied in a layered fashion. A couple of examples of this include:

• Applying save game state to a base game state
• Applying a patch to a base game state
  • Optionally allow save game state to be applied on top of this and completely override as necessary
  • Optionally allow save game state to be applied on top of this but "retroactively patch" existing save game data

I believe that I can design an algorithm that's relatively simple that should allow the layering to work, but I have a lot of potential corner cases to figure out (especially when considering retroactively vs not for applying game patches). I'll be exploring data structures to use and technologies to leverage for persisting this state.

It should be pretty exciting!

Delta State Algorithm Series

Just a reminder that if you're interested in this series, you'll want to use this page as the starting point. As I continue to add new content to this series, I'll come back and update this page with links to the parts of the series. Ideally at the end I'll have some working code I can share!

• Part 1 - Exploring Graphs and Trees (TBD)
• Part 2 - Undo/Redo Patterns (TBD)
• Part 3 - Generic State Serialization to a Graph (TBD)
• Part 4 -  ... TBD