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I am making a minecraft kind of game. In which I have 100s of objects and their crafting recipe.

Now I want to store them inside the program, ie I cannot load external files. Everything must be inside class for now. In future I might be able to use databases, once the game gets more traction.

All these objects will have addition properties like shootable,purchase cost,etc etc.

Some also have array property like 

{ research1: unlocks{ object1:50%, object2:100% }},

{ research2: unlocks{ object1:50% }}.

But all these objects will be constant with an exception of "locked" boolean.

If I do a huge database I'll also have to search data using filters on they keys like we do on sql. Example: "Give me all Researches that are unlocked and that unlocks object1"

What will be the best datastructure to store them? Thanks.

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    \$\begingroup\$ Which language are you using for the game? \$\endgroup\$
    – wip
    Commented Dec 10, 2017 at 14:19
  • \$\begingroup\$ I am using AS3 to create an AIR mobile game \$\endgroup\$
    – San
    Commented Dec 10, 2017 at 16:25

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100s of objects is not a large amount of data for current machines (computers, phones, consoles).
For only 100s of objects with different properties, you could save them as a comma-separated-values file (.csv) that can be opened and edited with Excel or similar worksheet software.
You can write run-time queries that will take a negligible time to loop around the list of objects and find the ones with the correct properties.
If you want to speed up the loading/saving of this array of data, you can try to serialize it in a binary format instead of the text-based .csv format.

For the properties of variable size (the arrays you mentioned) , if you decide the biggest possible number of items, you can hard-code this in the serialization and leave the unused array items as "empty".
If there is no limit... then you need a field to store the number of items, and then fields to store this data. You cannot use a simple flat format such as .csv in that case (unless you store arrays in different files referred to by some identifiers).

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  • \$\begingroup\$ I am using AS3, and I cannot use an external file so I have to code all that inside the program. Like using a static object type variable. I have never made a game that has like 500 data for game objects. What are the common practices programmers uses to store large data for this kind of games? \$\endgroup\$
    – San
    Commented Dec 10, 2017 at 16:33
  • \$\begingroup\$ @Shantanu I don't remember ActionScript well, however in C you can write something like this: onlinegdb.com/BkXhLLsbM \$\endgroup\$
    – wip
    Commented Dec 11, 2017 at 0:52
  • \$\begingroup\$ AS3 is very close to JAVA. so anything in JAVA will also do. So basically you are saying is i should create a class,define datatypes and then use that class object to store all those data? Currently I am storing them as kind of JSON. \$\endgroup\$
    – San
    Commented Dec 11, 2017 at 9:58
  • \$\begingroup\$ Yes. JSON is fine too. The point is that I do not think you should be using a more complex database solution, they are usually slow and not suited to real-time game development. Some of them might be used on game servers to store the data for multi-player games or MMOs, but it does not seem that it is what you are trying to do. \$\endgroup\$
    – wip
    Commented Dec 11, 2017 at 16:22

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