Hi,

what tools are you using to design your content like items stats, mob stats etc. I'm not talking about any art or source control tools. More like a simple excel sheet which contains all the stats of your items and will be exported to csv.

The reason I'm asking is, that the content I need to manage are small object networks which make it harder to be managed by excel/csv. And I would like to create an export script which would write the content to my own game format.

I looked into open office(calc) and starbasic(for export) and it is quite promising, but maybe you know other tools which can handle this task with ease ?

Well for storing the underlying data I'd recommend using either xml or an sqlite db.
Although mongodb is also gaining popularity but that really an enterprise level db but there might a compact redistributable version available.

In the past I’ve found building customer windows app is the best way of managing the data entry. That way you can enforce your associations, restrictions, and it makes it easy to add or change the data.

You might even be able to use the data entry tool to test parts of your code, and optimize the values accordingly. You could for instance use to the tool to test how each monster fairs against a standard level 10 fighter in combat to check the difficult scales accordingly and optimize the enemies that either over or under perform.

In recent times, most of my game development has been online and based around the database. As such I've tended to add content via a GUI front-end to the DB, eg. PGAdmin or the SQLite Manager add-on for Firefox.

I don't know what you mean by "small object networks" but I'd be surprised if it wasn't something that you could represent quite easily in Excel with a little thought about how the data is logically structured. It might be beneficial to write a macro or two if you have some sort of complex dependencies between objects.

[Edited by - Kylotan on June 30, 2010 7:35:14 AM]

Quote:

Well for storing the underlying data I'd recommend using either xml or an sqlite db. Although mongodb is also gaining popularity but that really an enterprise level db but there might a compact redistributable version available. In the past I’ve found building customer windows app is the best way of managing the data entry. That way you can enforce your associations, restrictions, and it makes it easy to add or change the data.

Yes, this would be the optimal solution, but this would consume too much time when you only got a few hours per week to work on your project :-)

Quote:

In recent times, most of my game development has been online and based around the database. As such I've tended to add content via a GUI front-end to the DB, eg. PGAdmin or the SQLite Manager add-one for Firefox.

A quite interesting way, pure and simple. I will take a look at this.

Thx for the input !