Data structure suitable for serialization

Questions
1

Hello! I’m new to making games with Defold. In Unity or Godot you can have objects referencing each other. But In Defold I can’t do the same with Lua tables due to serialization issues.

Looping references give an error. And if multiple tables refence another table, the referenced table gets duplicated:

lua serialize
lua serialize491×442 22.6 KB

One way to solve this is to add an ID to every object. But I’m not sure this is a good solution:

rooms.get_creatures_inside = function(room_id)
    local creatures = {}
    local room = rooms.get_by_id(room_id)
    for k, creature in ipairs(room.creatures_inside) do
        table.insert(creatures, creature)
    end
    return creatures
end
2

What kind of serialization are you talking about?
Writing/reading to json?

3

Sorry, forgot to mention.

I’m taking about saving game state with sys.save() and sys.load()