Serialization Confusion

Hey folks!

I had a whole lot of confusion this week over Serialization -- I was following the examples of how to save/load data in Unity, which point to BinaryFormatter as the way to go. (Specifically this video, but lots of resources around the net give the same technique.)

Where I ran into trouble is where I wanted to do some custom serialization/deserialization stuff, and found my way to ISerializationCallbackReceiver. What took me a while to figure out was that this only applied to serialization being done by Unity, where BinaryFormatter is part of the System namespace. I was wondering if maybe it was because I was running the serialization on a separate thread, if the [Serializable] attributes were applied correctly, etc. Went down a lot of rabbit holes before I finally realized that BinaryFormatter doesn't go through the Unity serialization pipeline.

Now that I understand it, it's obvious, of course, but it may be worth adding a note on the ISerializationCallbackReceiver documentation that it won't kick in when calling Serialize or Deserialize with BinaryFormatter.

That's all! Thanks for the great work.

 

Note that there's nothing preventing you from using ISerializationCallbackReceiver with custom serialization formats. You just have to call the methods yourself.