Hi guys,

So I'm starting out with Java, coming from Game Maker Studio 1.4, my game server has been using ini files to load and save data from, I'm not much of a fan of this, it doesn't feel right. I don't want hundreds or more ini files because all the have are their names, sections and keys, I need one for each player, world instances, and so on.

A guy suggested I have a look at Apache Derby, and creating a Java server, so I've gotten Eclipse, and downloaded the latest apache derby pack from their website, then in their documentation it says I simply need to copy over the files into the Eclipse work space and then right click the project folder within Eclipse and Apache Derby should be in there ready to import. It's not there, and Im also not seeing the same kind of files they show in their documentation.

I've got Eclipse Neon 3 and the Derby folder name is "db-derby-10.13.1.1-bin.zip". Anyone able to assist ?

I'd like to add, what would you call this, a library, a plugin ? not sure of Java terminology.

Sorry if I posted in the wrong forum, I did look for a Java/Eclipse section.

I am not a fan of Eclipse, because when I used it may years ago, it kept crashing and running out of memory and stopping in the middle of coding a lot.
So, the only think I can suggest is that perhaps you need to un-zip the package before you try to install it?

Separately, Derby is a small database engine you can embed in your program. That's fine. Another one like that is SQLite.
However, for most games (once you need more than one server instance, for whatever reason) you'll want to run a separate database server process.
PostgreSQL is great, and MySQL is also very popular (lately, MySQL is also forked into MariaDB and PerconaDB.)
There are also NoSQL databases, but I'd recommend you stay away from them unless you KNOW that you need SPECIFICALLY the particular combination of features/constraints that those give you.