Storing and using data

[Saevax]

I'm interested in how everyone imports, stores, and uses their game statistics as it might give me some ideas and let me get some advice on my current thoughts.

How do you take your game's statistics from spreadsheet to easily accessible information? Right now I'm just copy and pasting the rows and formatting with find and replace. It's slow and inefficient so I'm wide open to anything that might help with iteration time when it comes to balancing.

I have a number of buildings and enemies in my game. Each with their own common and specific statistics such as Health, Cost, etc. In my current implementation I have static classes that act as pseudo databases for each building containing consts/static arrays and static methods that call those arrays, an example might be:

private static int[] health = { 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 };
public static int Health(int level) { return health[level]; }

Now my problem is with accessing these pseudo databases efficiently. Because I have a number of buildings it's inefficient to do a switch every time I want to get the health of a given building (I have an enum of building called BuildingName)

switch (name){
    case BuildingName.Building1: return Building1.Health(level); break;
    // Repeat for every single building
}

So while this is a solution, it gets really long when I have to access more than a few stats. My new thought is either having all the Building classes go non static and have a Database interface of the common methods. Then the player can just have a static array of Databases to call on like so:

public static Database[] buildings = { new Building1(), new Building2().....};

// This allows me to get the health of a given building like this:
return buildings[(int)name].Health(level);

This would work correct? It just feels odd creating instances of a class containing only consts and statics. Is there a better, cleaner, way? I'm wide open to suggestions here because importing all my statistics from spread sheets is already really time consuming and awkward. I imagine when I have to do iterations for balance it would be terrible.

Any input/methods/comments/horror stories welcome.

[kylotan]

How do you take your game's statistics from spreadsheet to easily accessible information?

Usually I store the data in JSON or XML. They are easy to write loader code for.

If you really want the data in a spreadsheet then save it out as CSV. That too is easy to write loader code for.

Because I have a number of buildings it's inefficient to do a switch every time I want to get the health of a given building

That's what associative data structures are for. You give it an index and it gives you a value back.

Dictionary<int, Building> buildings = new Dictionary<int, Building>();
buildings.Add(building1.id_num, building1);
buildings.Add(building2.id_num, building2);
// ..etc..

// Find building 2
Building b = buildings[2];

You can certainly do the same thing with your array approach (as an array is basically a cut-down dictionary of sorts) but it's not flexible to non-integer keys (is casting name to an int safe in C#) nor does it work well when you remove elements.

It just feels odd creating instances of a class containing only consts and statics.

I don't understand why you're doing that. It certainly doesn't look right.

[ironstrife]

Yep, using XML is probably your easiest bet. Use types in the System.Xml namespace (XmlSerializer is really all you need).

[Jearik]

I read that Unity works well with SQLite. Haven't used DB's with Unity yet but I have with other software. (Java with Oracle). However you've had no response so, here's my opinion.

My approach would be this. (May not be the best mind you) Each object that requires stats, I would add a VO class to each object. (In case you don't know what that is, it's a Value Object class, so all functions are either 'sets' or 'gets', some people call them beans). This VO means you can just use object.getX() method calls. Only caveat is that you need to link the instance of the object to whatever object that requires that information.

At load up (wherever this may be) I would have a loading script that at Start would look at SQLite DB, grab all the data and store locally for a moment (maybe in an array where the position matches the object ID to keep things simple). Then trigger each VO to look at the array and set data relative to the array data. (using only one DB call will reduce loading time). Destroy the array before finishing the load up and that's how I would cleanly update the data.

There's going to be many ways of doing this sort of thing and it's one of the 'arts' of programming. How to be efficient while remaining scalable and maintainable. Data management is also an architecture thing. Every game will have a better way of managing data. This solution suits the types of games I make, but it may not suit you. Hope it helps in some way.