Nick Gravelyn

After my last article and some more tweaking, I’ve released a new CodePlex project based on file saving for XNA Game Studio called EasyStorage. Stealing from that project page:

EasyStorage is a library for making it quicker and easier for XNA Game Studio developers to manage the StorageDevice without all the details. EasyStorage uses a simple API to enable you to add file saving to your game.

EasyStorage uses a simple interface to define a “save device” which is any object that can handle file operations. By default, EasyStorage comes with three ready-to-go save devices:

PlayerSaveDevice – a save device that uses the XNA storage APIs to manage a StorageDevice that is for a specific player
SharedSaveDevice – a save device that uses the XNA storage APIs to manage a StorageDevice that is shared for all players
PCSaveDevice – a save device that does not rely on XNA storage APIs and intended for games with a PC only release

You can choose to use one of the above or build your own save devices from the code included in the library. Also note that PlayerSaveDevice and SharedSaveDevice both work on PC as well, so you can choose to use those in a PC project as well.

EasyStorage is basically the library I discussed in Storage Device Management 2.0 with a few tweaks in it. It’s a pretty solid foundation and pretty ready for use. The one thing I didn’t get to was making a solid multi-threaded save device such that all file operations took place on a second thread. If anyone out there wants to make that for me I’d be more than happy to integrate that in to the library.

Hopefully EasyStorage makes life a little easier for XNA GS devs making their games so they can worry about the gameplay instead of the storage device. It’s all open source under the MIT license so basically do whatever with it as long as you don’t sue me and don’t claim you wrote it.