Version: 2018.4
LanguageEnglish
  • C#
Method group is Obsolete

NetworkBehaviour.OnSerialize

Suggest a change

Success!

Thank you for helping us improve the quality of Unity Documentation. Although we cannot accept all submissions, we do read each suggested change from our users and will make updates where applicable.

Close

Submission failed

For some reason your suggested change could not be submitted. Please <a>try again</a> in a few minutes. And thank you for taking the time to help us improve the quality of Unity Documentation.

Close

Cancel

Obsolete The high level API classes are deprecated and will be removed in the future.

Declaration

public bool OnSerialize(NetworkWriter writer, bool initialState);

Parameters

writer Writer to use to write to the stream.
initialState If this is being called to send initial state.

Returns

bool True if data was written.

Description

Virtual function to override to send custom serialization data. The corresponding function to send serialization data is OnDeserialize().

The initialState flag is useful to differentiate between the first time an object is serialized and when incremental updates can be sent. The first time an object is sent to a client, it must include a full state snapshot, but subsequent updates can save on bandwidth by including only incremental changes. Note that SyncVar hook functions are not called when initialState is true, only for incremental updates.

If a class has SyncVars, then an implementation of this function and OnDeserialize() are added automatically to the class. So a class that has SyncVars cannot also have custom serialization functions.

The OnSerialize function should return true to indicate that an update should be sent. If it returns true, then the dirty bits for that script are set to zero, if it returns false then the dirty bits are not changed. This allows multiple changes to a script to be accumulated over time and sent when the system is ready, instead of every frame.