Modelling deterministic and nondeterministic data separately
- by Superstringcheese
I'm working with the Microsoft ADO.NET Entity Framework for a game project. Following the advice of other posters on SO, I'm considering modelling deterministic and nondeterministic data separately. The idea for this came from a discussion on multiplayer games, but it seemed to make sense in a single-player scenario as well.
Deterministic (things that aren't going to change during gameplay)
Attributes (Strength, Agility, etc.)
and their descriptions
Skills and their descriptions and
requirements
Races, Factions, Equipment, etc.
Base Attribute/Skill/Equipment
loadouts for monsters
Nondeterministic (things that will change a lot during gameplay)
Beings' current AttributeModifers (Potion of Might = +10 Strength), current health and mana, etc.
Player inventory, cash, experience, level
Player quests states
Player FactionRelationships
...and so on.
My deterministic model would serve as a set of constants. My nondeterministic model would provide my on-the-fly operable data and would be serialized to a savegame file to maintain game state between play sessions. The data store will be an embedded SQL Compact database.
So I might want to create relations between my Attributes table (deterministic model) and my BeingAttributeModifiers table (nondeterministic model), but how do I set that up across models?
Det model/db Nondet model/db
____________ ________________________
|Attributes | |PlayerAttributeModifiers|
|------------| |------------------------|
|Id | |Id |
|Name | |AttributeId |
|Description | |SourceId |
------------ |Value |
------------------------
Should I use two separate models (edmx) that transact with a single database containing both deterministic-type and nondeterministic-type tables? Or should/can I use two separate databases in one model? Or two models each with their own database?
With distinct models/dbs it seems like this will get really complicated and I'll end up fighting EF a lot, rolling my own transaction code, and generally losing out on a lot of the advantages of the framework.
I know these are vague questions, I'm just looking for a sanity check before I forge ahead any further.
