Anyway the problem with this is that everything gets written to disk: v-tables, padding bytes, mysterious bytes from the (lack of) empty base class optimization, etc. So yeah, everything counts. The great thing is that it makes you painfully aware of how much bytes you waste, and where. Especially when you then write converters from PC binary files to, say, PS3 binary files - the class layout is not always the same, so, serious “fun” follows.

At the very least you need to swizzle all fields to account for endian-ness.

At which point you might as well write code to read/write each field individually (or have your reflection system do this). Then you know exactly what is being written irrespective of class/struct size.

One thing: Why are multiple cut lines not allowed/possivle?