Gauging interest in a Dominions Roguelike...

[Ed Kolis]

Actually, there are multiplayer realtime online roguelikes... google around for MAngband, TomeNet, and Crossfire. But I don't think I'll get that complicated... a regular roguelike is hard enough to write as it is!

Speaking of which, I'm looking for a good way to store game data. I was considering XML, but it's pretty unwieldy unless you have a decent editor, which I'm having trouble finding. I was also considering some sort of relational database, but most of those require some sort of fancy installation procedures; the only one I can think of which doesn't is Access, and that's commercial and only runs on Windows. So unless I can come up with a good XML editor or a free portable DBMS which can be used by a program without the user having to jump through hoops to set it up, I think I'm left with one option (well, two, if you count hardcoding everything ): text files. But text files mean I'd have to do all the parsing and consistency checking myself - not that that's TOO daunting, but I like to make things easy. So any suggestions?

[Cainehill]

If you just format the text files properly, they're actually _very_ easy to parse. Either of two ways will suffice - delimitted fields, where each piece of information is separated by a rare/unused character ( for instance, the pipe symbol '|') or where each field is always a fixed width. Having done a lot of work with both, I suggest the delimitter, and an iostream extraction class that does conversion and error checking on the contents (this is vital in either case).

Either way, place the responsibility for data on the people editting it : if the formatting is wrong, bail out, preferably with an appropriate and useful error message showing the line of data, and the specific field / data that caused the error.

Otherwise, you write thousands of lines of code to compensate for user error, which is an incredible waste of programming time / effort if you aren't going to have tens of thousands of users.

[lebarjack]

Maybe SQLite is the solution. It's a small C database library.
I have even found some bindings for C#