RDBMS

Mephisto · #1 October 26th, 2001, 02:00 PM

This is a very friendly community, no one will be flamed here. I think in the history of this board there were only 2 or 3 people that could not act like grown-ups and were expelled after 2 warnings. So, don't be afraid of flames, you don't need your protective suit here.

quote:
Originally posted by St-Cyr:
Just wondering, was there an effort to use relational databases, either inside malfador or by the mods community?

Now I'm lost. What is such a database and what can you do with it?

Lemmy · #2 October 26th, 2001, 02:45 PM

i don't think anyone here even mentioned relational databases but you St-Cyr.
Maybe malfador used it, mayube not, you would have to ask them to be sure.

St-Cyr · #3 October 26th, 2001, 03:07 PM

Sorry, maybe not a lot. Hmm let's say exchanges about how easy a change in the SEIV app was or not. Seen, hrmm... read some about this.

What's a relational database?

In life: Oracle, MS-SQL, DB2, Sybase, MySQL, Access, etc

In science: mostly symply 3 rules which are called the 3 normal forms as defined by Cobb + add meta-data to it.

Those are real easy to find on the web so I won't enumerate them here. I'll just preach for my own:

Very simplified, it's a way to solve validation and assertion problems in a multi-user setting while the data is coming IN and not when it's going OUT.

I've seen/helped it solve excruciating logical and/or performance problems. A mouse click that used to take 45 seconds now takes the animation time to depress it; a night job that needed full cpu for 8 hours now runs in 5 minutes during rush-hour; etc.

LazarusLong42 · #4 October 26th, 2001, 03:28 PM

St-Cyr,

I work with databases quite a bit even though I'm not an actual DBA. (I use Access and mySQL). I don't see any really _useful_ way in which an RDB could be used by players or modders, though... which I think is why you don't see many people talking about them here.

What sort of things would you be talking about doing with SE4 and an RDB?

(Within the game, of course, I can see a lot of call for all sorts of relations, but that's somethign else

LL/Eric Snyder II

Puke · #5 October 26th, 2001, 07:38 PM

i dont see a whole lot of use here for a RDB either. people have dumped things like the components file into spreadsheets to analyze different damage / weight / RoF ratios, and other such things.. but unless you wanted to extract the most optimal ship design with a given technology level or something, im not sure what you would accomplish.

Atrocities · #6 October 26th, 2001, 08:01 PM

DBA is one job that I would not envy having. It takes a special kind of person with a keen analitical eye to do that kind of work. The most I have done with Data Basing is with Acess and MySQL. Now statistics, thats for me.

God showed man how much he cared when SPC was realized.

------------------
New Age Ship Yards

"We've made too many compromises already, too many retreats! They invade our space and we fall back -- they assimilate entire worlds and we fall back! Not again! The line must be drawn here -- this far, no further! And I will make them pay for what they've done!" -- Captain Picard STNG

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Atrocities · #7 October 26th, 2001, 08:43 PM

Here is the old thread about CODE. Read at own risk.

Alpha Kodiak · #8 October 26th, 2001, 10:27 PM

Malfador could have used an RDBMS for storing all of the data in the various AI files, component files, etc. and it would have probably worked more efficiently than parsing the text files, as is now done. The advantage to the text files is that anyone with a text editor can make their own modifications to the game. It would have been difficult (possible, but difficult) to provide the customization flexibility we have now using a database scheme to store all of the information.

If this were a production package where stability and data integrity were critical, I would definitely want it running on an RDBMS, but I believe that for a game of this nature, the text files are the way to go.

Having said that, I believe that the game would probably be more stable and perform faster if the data was in an RDBMS. What might have been cool, and might be good for SE5 would be to use the text files to populate an RDBMS. Then, people could make their changes to the text files and run a utility to load the changes into the database. Data validation would occur at that time, so you would never see an error crop up in the game because you hit an error in the text file. Multiple mods could easily be supported by adding a mod name to the key information for storing and extracting the data. I would imagine that this would entail a significant internal architecture change though, so we would not see anything like that in SEIV.

Ok, time to take off my designer's hat. It's too much fun to think about what could be done in a game when I am supposed to be debugging a GIS query interface that keeps wanting to lose the operator's selections.

Puke · #9 October 26th, 2001, 11:23 PM

are we talking about the design of the game, or utilities to mod the game or play more effectively?

St-Cyr · #10 October 27th, 2001, 01:25 AM

I was told by a friend that he spend up to 30 hours extracting out an ordered file to figure out the best ways to use components.

Told him he should have converted those data files to csv files and import these in a RDBMS.

I didn't convince him. So, I tried my own medecine. Took me about 10 minutes to convert one of those file so that I could load it in a database. I did another couple of files and then started to play with relationships. Hmm.. had fun. I'm a DBA. Of course I prefer to design than to administer so it's always fun to figure things out.

I found a lot of flame-threads with people hinting at programmer's knowledge. I've also read that SE up to Version 2 was written in VB and Delphi afterwards.

Just wondering, was there an effort to use relational databases, either inside malfador or by the mods community?