Database Driven Games

I was implementing a simple text parser so I could read initial values for my game from a text file the other day. I was pondering on how to make the process more efficient and came up with an interesting idea. What if you were to store all of these values in a database and then at load time you would run sql statements against the database and get back an easily parsed string with the values. For example, my current game project has many different weapons and I store information about them like model_file, model_scale, expolision_type, damage, etc. If I were to store all of these values in a database then at load time I could simply run a statement like "select (*) from weapons_table" and it would hand back a string of characters containing all of these values for all of the weapons. I could then initialize the internal variables with these values. I then began to think about how I would go about creating and adding on to this database. Since I am pretty handy with Access my thoughts naturally turn there first but I wouldn't want to force a developer to use a piece of software so blatantly not portable to other platforms. I also thought that it would be cool for a game designer to be able to add weapons to the game w/o any help from the programmers. For some of the values he could pick from a list box of all the available values. For example, say he were creating a new weapon and he went to enter the expolsion_type. He could click on a drop down list containing "FIRE_BALL, ICE_STORM, LIGHTNING_BALL". The values in here would be queried from somewhere else in the database where they had been entered by the programmer once he had added these special effects to the game. But if you were to do this then you would want some sort of security in the database. After all you wouldn't want the designer just adding METEOR_STORM to the list when that effect doesn't exist. Access only allows you to do security on the database as a whole not in indiviual tables. You could get into linking databases but this would quickly get messy. Thinking about the security reminded me of the security stuff I was recently learning with ASP. It also reminded me of the security you could implement using PHP (much like this site). Both ASP and PHP have excellent databasing capabilities. Another benefit of using them would be that all the designer would need is a web browser to do stuff in the database. He could then use any OS he likes. There are a lot of things that you could expand this idea into. You could allow a designer to script more advanced effects from a list of simpler effects built into the engine. You could script basic behaviour of some AI entities. You coul have artists uploading files much like on this site and having the database organize them. There are a lot of things you could do with this. It would also greatly help to organize projects with enourmous amounts of data. There are several good ways for a programmer to query data in and out of the database. There are libraries that'll handle it on tons of platforms. If you are on Windows adding database support is trivial with some MFC calls. You can also use the source from PHP to build a library of your own or you can link Python directly into your app and use its database functionality.

I am planning on trying something out like this in my current project so I will let you know how it goes. I'm sure someone else has already thought of using this method but it was new to me and I wanted to share it.