Lots of games also use data structures derived from tables/csv at runtime to configure things like stats. So they would also need these (human readable) values in the save files
Hard to tell from speculation and not having the data
Depends on optimization levels, data types, and whatnot. If it’s a string to be fed into the API of a different binary then the compiler will often not optimize down that representation. Internal function names are likely to be optimized that way, with lookup tables holding original function names (at least for any externally exposed function).
I thought that enums were supposed to compile down to aa, ab, ac when you actually build the game.
Depending on the language, they are.
Lots of games also use data structures derived from tables/csv at runtime to configure things like stats. So they would also need these (human readable) values in the save files
Hard to tell from speculation and not having the data
Depends on optimization levels, data types, and whatnot. If it’s a string to be fed into the API of a different binary then the compiler will often not optimize down that representation. Internal function names are likely to be optimized that way, with lookup tables holding original function names (at least for any externally exposed function).