Should I use a database to store ~10 000 names in a sports game?

Question

I'm working on a single player sports game for a year or so and this doubt came up: how should I treat/store big amounts of data, like player names.

Let's take an arbitrary number as example: 10000 names, 5000 first names and 5000 surnames. These names would be equally divided between 100 countries, which give us 50 first names and 50 surnames per country.

Should I have a local database with these names (or even these countries) considering this data will be needed to generate new players names during the course of the game? Would that introduce limitations, considering I want to make my game moddable by players, as much as possible?

These doubts can be extended to other, more complex game entities, such as:

• Players - each one with their own face, attributes, team etc...
• Teams - each one with its own crest, kit, squad etc...

In my previous research about that, the SQLite popped up as a seemingly viable solution. It happens that I have almost no experience with DB's (specially in games) and would like to know if this is a good direction before start to study and try to implement it.

Answer 1

When the data is static while the game is running or small enough to fit into RAM, then databases have very little benefit compared to the technical complexity they add. You can just as well store all that data in text files (TextAssets). When the game starts, then you parse those files, store all that data in adequate data-structures and then access those data-structures at runtime.

When you would like to maintain the data in a more organized way within the Unity editor, then ScriptableObjects are your friends. This is a feature which allows you to create custom Unity asset types which you can then create, manage, edit and use like any other Unity asset. You could, for example, create a ScriptableObject class "Country" which has three text assets, a "nameFileMale", "nameFileFemale" and a "nameFileLastname", plus all the other data you have about a counry. You can then create one of these assets for every country in your game and assign the threee text files which list the names for that country.

And just by the way: Did you know that C# can do SQL queries on arrays and other containers which implement IEnumerable?