hey fedi programmer folks, this isn't urgent but i'm going to have to store my block game's world data in some kind of acid compliant database at some point.

[eniko@mastodon.gamedev.place]

hey fedi programmer folks, this isn't urgent but i'm going to have to store my block game's world data in some kind of acid compliant database at some point. do you have any recommendations? it must be a file-based database, obviously. and game data doesn't usually neatly conform to the boring numbered rows with named columns table design of traditional databases for websites and stuff

i think ideally i'd just be able to store raw binary data

[eniko@mastodon.gamedev.place]

i mostly ask because databases are for boring stuff and i make games so i have no idea what the hotness in databases is

[eniko@mastodon.gamedev.place]

people put hundreds, thousands of hours into block game worlds. entire communities rely on them in the case of multiplayer servers. whatever i use has to be acid compliant so that people don't get screwed over by save corruption cause i decided reinventing the wheel would be a cool project

[mort@floss.social]

@eniko SQLite is almost certainly what you want. Old, slow-moving and reliable project made by people who take seriously the fact that their software messing up could means cars crash and planes fall out of the sky.

The only alternative I'd take seriously is to use the old "write out everything to a new file and rewrite it into place" trick, but that gets tricky if worlds are big and you only wanna load and save parts of it at a time

[eniko@mastodon.gamedev.place]

@mort i honestly do not trust any filesystem more than an sqlite database >_>

[darkgnostic@mastodon.gamedev.place]

@eniko @mort SQLite is quite safe, with proper WAL setting. As with any DB there is always a risk to have corrupted files. You create snapshots, and save daily or on hour basis.

[aeva@mastodon.gamedev.place]

@darkgnostic @eniko @mort sqlite is what I plan on using as a data store for my games. it is very fast, and very very stable

[aeva@mastodon.gamedev.place]

@darkgnostic @eniko @mort this is somewhat motivated by me being traumatized by geniuous game developers thinking they're too smart to use normal software and inventing the worst relational databases you've ever seen (and then having to clean up their messes)