Spawnable and asset database.

[Armored-Dragon]

It will be important to create a database for the spawnables and the associated assets. When there are a ton of spawnables, parsing the entire directory tree for the spawnables alone may cause trouble before even touching the assets. Having all of the information about the inventory available quickly would drastically speed up operations and queries at runtime.

[Armored-Dragon]

I was initially leaning towards including godot-SQLite, but this might not be wise in the long run as this addon would likely have issues when it runs in the browser. I think it would be better to stick with Godot-native solutions for handling this.
I found online there are alternative implementations of databases using Resources. Most implementations I have found utilize LLM / AI code,, which is something I am trying to avoid, so I probably will not be able to use any of them. Most of these implementations are also more general purpose and would be vastly overkill for what I would need it. I will likely need to make my own database.

[Armored-Dragon]

When this is created, there will need to be a new dedicated "Export Spawnable" feature that will pack the metadata into a container (Compressed archive) file for the spawnable item. As there is no longer a guarantee that all information about a spawnable will be present, this exported container file will be the recommended form of "backup" or transfer of files outside of the OpenMinerva network.

[Armored-Dragon]

Additionally I need to figure out a good way to protect against database corruption. Should the database become inoperable or invalid, there should be some kind of backup / fallback source of data about saved spawnables.

• Potential Solution 1:

  • Occasional backups of the database. These backups would happen on launch of the application, or when an action is performed on the database, or some other kind of interval.

• Potential Solution 2:

  • Store small binary files next to the spawnables in the inventory so that if the database needs to be rebuilt, the database can recursively parse the local inventory folder and snatch the information about each spawnable directly.
  • This might be the best way to ensure that any non-corrupted asset / item can be saved, but it might be heavy on the storage requirements. Although each binary file probably won't be bigger than a few hundred bytes. Assuming 100,000 total spawnables, a few hundred bytes (Assuming exactly 700 bytes) would be measured in single-digit megabytes.