Serializing mutable objects in java

Question

I am programming a networked turn based java game, and use the java serialization api to serialize the game state each time a player does a move.

To my annoyance, I discovered that the api assumes the objects are immutable. This means that each time I try to send the updated game state, the old game state is received at the clients.

Is there some way to make the objectoutput/objectinputstream forget that an object has already been sent and make a new object each time?

Answer 1

ObjectOutputStream.reset() is what you are looking for: Oracle docs . It forces the stream to send updated objects.