Save Files

You probably need somewhat files for saving game’s current state to be used in the next session. However, Cube2D Engine supports nothing of a sort but the original idea was to bind ini.h & json to wren for that purpose and previous versions of the engine were using ini.h instead of Game.wren. I did try to bind json to wren but my brain just couldn’t comprehend the greatness of json to be bind-ed into wren and as for ini.h, I never even tried binding it to wren so lets see how you do it.

Wren Files

Only for manual configuration, unless you make somesort of wren parser and stringifier.

wren has really nice import statements so you may just want to have simple wren files where you have variables, below are two files demonstrating a example of using wren files as configuration files.

// File: Config.wren
var Config = {
	"Key": "Val",
	"MyInteger": -5,
	"MyString": "Something"
}

// File: Main.wren
import "/path/to/Config.wren" for Config

DoSomethingWith(Config["Key"])
DoSomethingElseWith(Config["MyInteger"])
System.print(Config["MyString"])

Json Files

• Q: But didn’t you say you were unable to bind json to wren
• A: Yes, but there is a better alternative than binding json to wren because C++ is not dynamically typed while wren is so it would be smarter to just code a json library in wren so lets see how to do that.

I wasn’t going to code a json library but luckily for you, someone has already made it for wren and its called wren-json..

You need wren-json in your desired scripts directory.

First, here’s a .json file

// File: Save.json
{
	"Player": {
		"Color": "RED",
		"Size": 32
	},
	"Coins": 50
}

Second, Here’s a .wren file

// File: SceneExample.wren
import "Engine"
import "raylib" for RL, COLOR
import "path/to/json.wren" for JSON

class SceneGame is Scene {
	construct new() {

		_Save = JSON.parse(RL.LoadFileText("Path/To/Config/File/From/Executable/Save.json"))

		var Size = _Save["Player"]["Size"]
		_Player = Rect.new(0, 0, Size, Size)
		// Yea, ["Stuff"] for .json, of course
		_Player.Tint = COLOR[_Save["Player"]["Color"]]

		_Coins = _Save["Coins"]

		_Coins = _Coins + 1

		super()
	}
	Update() {
		
		RL.SaveFileText("Path/To/Config/File/From/Executable/Save.json", JSON.stringify(_Save))

		var Speed = 10
		Engine.WASDMovement(_Player.Base, Speed)
	}
	Draw() {
		_Player.Draw()
	}
}

The above code has been tested with correct paths.

If I’m correct, wren-json doesn’t have a file loading or saving system or nothing of a sort that’s why we have to rely on raylib’s file management functionality here.

• Q: So why can’t we use it for manual user configuration?
• A: wren-json stringifys json objects into a single lined .json code and when its saved your user configuration file will become a single lined file and hard for user to configure whereas in non-manual configuration i.e. in game options configuration the single lining doesn’t really matter.