I’m reaching that point where i seem to have tables for my tables of input data for my game and game engine to build my game.
How do other game developers manage their input data?
What tools do you all use, or are they all custom built for the game?
I haven’t programmed games but have done a lot of programming in my youthful days. I relied on in order of most complexity to least: class instances, association lists, and hashtables a lot for my data. Sometimes you mix them together.
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It could be helpful to have a bit more context. What technology, engines, and languages are you using? What type of data are you storing in these tables, how are they related? Is your data self-referential? How do you need to load them into the engine to utilize them? etc…
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Language is c++, the game and engine are custom one off. Currently the data is all stored in XML files and the game loads them at startup, because you can serialize to and from maps and array’s without any extra steps because XML support’s these constructs. This means the game doesn’t really do any processing to use them. In this way the data is self referential, but how tables relate is not exactly stored, thats more just known by me and is programmed into the game along the way. The purpose is to eliminate magic numbers in the games code base such that anyone can edit how the game behaves. This also is why i have chosen XML as anyone can open and read it and change a value. The point of this is i want the game to be highly modifiable so someone with enough time and effort could in effect totally revamp the game.
Currently i’m building a mod tool for the game that help visualizing and editing all the XML files. This is pretty straight forward as you can create a handful of template functions to render almost any given map or array.
Here is a little example of 2 related arrays where locations are, and how far between them, i give myself or a modder a visual of the data, and you can simply drag the points to change/update the data.
Well i was hoping to hear others reply’s to different tools available if any existed that fill this type of roll. I am aware my case is somewhat one off special however, knowledge of whats out there may help me and others in the future.
I think there’s definitely some tools out there, came across this one: No-code xml schema builder | Schema Visualizer
It’s not the one I was thinking of though. Lot of folks are using JSON these days over XML, but agree XML, while more verbose, is a bit easier to work with sometimes. Can’t remember what tool I was thinking I’ve seen in the past.
Rider has some integrated tools for helping, but again for JSON and not XML, but does support some other formats:
Not too many things would let you display a visual map like that though, so sometimes custom tooling is just what happens for your data model. Probably depends on how complex you think your data map is going to be and if that custom visualization aligned with your game model is going to help someone make changes.
If it was just for the game itself and not for modding/manipulation, I would have maybe suggested sqllite.
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