[ivanmilles]

This echoes the tribulations of the original Starcraft devs. [1]

> ...based on my experiences the biggest problems in StarCraft related to the use of doubly-linked linked lists. Linked lists were used extensively in the engine to track units with shared behavior. [...] Some of the link fields were shared among several lists, so it was necessary to know exactly which list an object was linked into in order to safely unlink. And some link fields were even stored in C unions with other data types to keep memory utilization to a minimum. So the game would blow up all the time. All the time.

Serialising game state to disk was done by moving all those scattered objects into a contiguous memory block, re-link, save to disk, and then restore the game engine's internal state.

> It was necessary to fixup all the link pointers (taking special care of unioned pointer fields) so that all 1600 units could be written at once. And then unfixup the link pointers to keep playing. Yuck.

[1] http://www.codeofhonor.com/blog/tough-times-on-the-road-to-s...