| writer | Writer to use to write to the stream. |
| initialState | If this is being called to send initial state. |
bool True if data was written.
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.