Great success!

Level saving and loading works!  I need to fix up a few more things and optimize some obvious bits, but the core functionality is there!  I would post a screenshot to show the success but it really wouldn't look any different than a normal shot - oh well.

I'm currently exporting out all level objects in a text format (the same format I've built for loading data) which seems to work fairly well.  It's fairly slow to parse (string manipulation in C++ isn't really a pleasant process, and I'm sure my string class implementation isn't helping matters much) and it takes quite a bit of space (current 50x50 level with 15 creatures is taking about 185kb on disk), but the upside is that it's human readable/editable/debuggable.

The basic process for saving is as follows:

- Construct a new package object
- Add current level to the root set of objects for that package
- Copy that root set to a new set of ObjectsToSave
- Start traversing all objects in the ObjectsToSave set, adding any objects they reference to ObjectsToSave such that we recurse through the entire object "tree"
- Write out a "packageinfo" block, which is really just forward declarations of objects contained in the package (useful for loading which I'll point out below)
- Iterate through the ObjectsToSave set and write out any data that differs from the current set of defaults

Fortunately I'm able to leverage the object/property system pretty well for this, so at the highest logical point it's only 15 lines of code or so to save a set of objects.  Loading is a little more complicated at the top level since I have to do some extra parsing to know what data is incoming, but it's still pretty manageable at this point.  At any rate, the process for loading is currently:

- Construct a new package object
- Open the package, read the "packageinfo" which will create all of the objects contained in this package using the default values and creates them using the same names that they had on save.  This allows us to easily find references to other objects contained in the packages when loading without having to resort to a separate fix-up phase.
- Read in the objects' data
- Hand out some post-load notifications for specific objects to fix-up any data (currently only the level object does some munging)

There's also a little trickery of finding the loaded player, copying over it's values to the current player, and then deleting the loaded version.  All in all it's fairly straightforward and seems to work fairly well.  It took quite a while to find all the properties that I either wasn't saving out that I needed to, or all the other bits of data that get initialized on level creation and now needs to be handled separately.  For the most part this has helped me find older chunks of code that needed a slight refactoring anyways which is always a good thing (although I did wonder if it would ever end on several occasions).

Woot!