I’ve pretty much broken down at this point, and decided to make an external loader class for HamQuest savegames.
While the encapsulated “convert me to xml” functions work just fine for saving games, similarly internal “convert xml to data” functions become so bizarrely contrived as to make me cringe whenever I work on it.
It’ll still make me cringe a bit to have an encapsulated ToXml in all of the data classes, but an external FromXml loader class, but I’d like to get this done without rearchitecting it.
In other news, the backend to the playdeez.com highscore/user system is now mysql. Still ASP accessing it, but it is a step in the correct direction.
The Grumpy GameDev 