HI! Tried changing the Cine engine’s savegame format from plain data without any markers to a chunked format akin to IFF. Got lots of ideas, and some code together too, but eventually gave up as making it really work would’ve required some major objectifying of the engine and it’s still very C style in many places currently.
So I’m not going to make use of a finegrained totally new chunked format now, but I’ll make a compromise and use a new chunked format but dump most of the savegame data into a single chunk. The format can be improved later.
I looked into how the SCUMM engine has implemented its savegame handling and its approach looks to be quite an interesting one. Take a look at scumm/saveload.h and scumm/saveload.cpp.
P.S. My IRC attendance on #scummvm will suffer in the near future as the server on which I ran irssi in a screen moves town starting today. I’ll try to get back on IRC during Sunday or Monday the latest.