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Since 2016-02-16, Lady is deprecated. I will still fix reported bugs, but for new projects, I recommend bitser if you're using LuaJIT, and binser otherwise.

Lady

Lady is a library to save and load savegames for games made in LÖVE. It is based on the fast, robust, richly-featured table serialization library Ser.

Lady currently supports MiddleClass, SECS, hump.class and Slither. Pull requests to add support for more class implementations are welcome.

30log is also supported, as long as you:

  1. Don't call tostring on any loaded instance of a 30log class.
  2. Don't have methods that make use of upvalues in any 30log class.

Like Ser itself, you can use, distribute and extend Lady under the terms of the MIT license.

Using it

(A more comprehensive reference can be found below.)

To use Lady, simply require it:

local lady = require 'lady'

Register all your classes at some point before saving or loading:

-- using MiddleClass:
local Player = lady.register_class(class('Player'))
-- using SECS:
local Player = lady.register_class(class:new(), 'Player')
-- using hump.class:
local Player = lady.register_class(class{}, 'Player')
-- using Slither:
class "Player" {
    __attributes__ = {lady.register_class}
}
-- if you prefer, you can register your classes in another place
-- for example, all in the same place:
lady.register_class(Player, 'Player')
lady.register_class(Enemy, 'Enemy')
lady.register_class(Goal, 'Goal')
-- if you use MiddleClass, you don't have to register every class manually if
-- you include the following function definition after importing MiddleClass
-- and Lady:
function class.Object.static:subclassed(other)
    lady.register_class(other)
end

When you want to save your game:

lady.save_all(file_name, player, enemy_list, goal_list)

And to load:

player, enemy_list, goal_list = lady.load_all(file_name)

Reference

###lady.register_class(class[, classname])

Registers class. It will be expected that the argument classname is provided. If absent, class.name will be used instead. The name of the class should be a string that contains a valid Lua identifier.

Names starting with an underscore are reserved and cannot be used for Lady. Similarly, when using Slither, nested classnames (like "foods.Cake") are not supported. If you have classes with these kinds of names, provide a custom classname to lady.register_class.

This function returns class, so it can be used as a decorator.

###lady.save_all(filename, objects...)

Saves all the objects passed to a file named filename in the save directory.

###lady.load_all(filename)

Returns the objects from the file filename in the save directory.

The values are returned in the same order as they were passed to lady.save_all.

No constructors will be called for any of the objects directly or indirectly loaded.

###lady.register_resource(resource, name)

Registers a resource (generally Images and Sources). The name provided should be a valid identifier. Note that this name will receive a prefix in the save file, so it can start with an underscore and names will not conflict with class names even if they are the same.

###lady.register_resource_table(resource_table[, name])

Register all resources found as values in resource_table. They are expected to use string keys, which will be used as the resource names. If name is passed, it will be used as a prefix for all the resource names in this table. This can be used to prevent conflicts if there are different resource tables which might share some keys.

See also