Persistence Question

Question

Hi,
I am attempting to write something like a text game in Java. Obviously for something like this I need to be able to save the state of the program, so I am attempting to use persistence but I am running into a problem. My Game object contains everything to do with the game and I have a StartGame object that performs the saving and loading and calls game object to run.
I can successfully save and load the game object using File and Object Output/InputStreams but upon loading the Game object no longer has any of the objects it is supposed to have saved. For example, there is a currentRoom pointer that points to an object of type Room (a custom class). I want this (and many other pointers like it) to have their referenced objects saved and still be pointing to them when a file is loaded. Can anyone enlighten me as to why this is not working?
I guess the alternative might be to save each and every object within Game individually, but from what I have read it seems like it's supposed to be simpler than that. Thanks for any help.

Answer 1

I realized I made a silly mistake and was writing the wrong file name originally, but now I have another problem in that it will not even write the game object to the ObjectOutputStream.
This is the class that runs the game:
import java.io.*;
public class StartGame2
     static Game game;
     static boolean runOnce = true;
     public static void main(String args[])
          game = new Game();
          while(!game.exit)
               game.load = false;
               game.save = false;
               game.runGame();
               if(game.save)
                    save(game.saveName);
               if(game.load)
                    load(game.loadName);
          System.exit(0);
     static void save(String saveName)
          try
               // Create a file to write game system
               FileOutputStream out = new FileOutputStream (saveName);
               // Create an object output stream, linked to out
               ObjectOutputStream objectOut = new ObjectOutputStream (out);                    
               // Write game to disk
               objectOut.writeObject (game);               
               // Close object output stream
               objectOut.close();
               Game.print("Game saved as " + saveName);
          catch (Exception e)
               System.err.println ("Unable to create game data");
     static void load(String loadName)
          FileInputStream fin = null;
          ObjectInputStream objectIn = null;
          try
               // Create a file input stream
               fin = new FileInputStream(loadName);
               // Create an object input stream
               objectIn = new ObjectInputStream(fin);
               // Read an object in from object store, and cast it to a game
               game = (Game) objectIn.readObject();
          catch (Exception e)
               Game.print("Failed to load.");
}//End startGameThe Game class itself is of the form:
public class Game implements Serializable
        public void runGame()
          //These should only run once
          if(StartGame2.runOnce)
               welcome();          
               makeRooms();                    
               makePeople();
               if(!exit && !load)
                    intro();          
                    StartGame2.runOnce = false;
                        while(!exit && !load && !save)
                             ...doStuff...
}Edited by: DrSpock11 on Mar 2, 2009 11:06 AM