Databases in Games

Hey i am wondering what are some ways to use databases within games, like rpgs, besides just as a way to use a save file... im having a little trouble totally understanding databases besides that they are good for shopping purposes and info about peoples buying habbits.

The main reason i ask is because i would like to make an RPG using a data base that stores information about different items that a player is able to get in a game (it stores some of the stats in the database)...

My 2nd question is what are the coding in VB6 to use the databases within the VB6 programming language.

P.S. i would like to use Microsoft Access as my Database Program

The ADO tutorials and examples in the FAQ (http://www.xtremevbtalk.com/showthread.php?t=39722) over at the Database and Reporting section of this forum are definitely worth a look.

If using a database seems overkill to you, theres always the ...

Hello Revenge,
when using DB in games, its a general practise to make ur custom DB rather than using off the shelf applications.

Hello Revenge,
when using DB in games, its a general practise to make ur custom DB rather than using off the shelf applications.

Thats what i would like to do i just dont understand where i would write it up in, like excel ? or do i just write it on the game? and then how do i read it from that database

databases are very good for storing related information (hence, the term RELATIONAL databases)

In addition, programming objects like ADO remove the low-level disk I/O, the sorting and searching, and so on from your app, and encapsulate it within the object. While a recordset is slower to populate than is an array of UDT, and takes a bit more time to loop through the recordset than does looping through an array, sorting and finding is substantially faster than the same operations on an array of UDT for a medium-sized data set (10K objects or so) and much faster on large data sets.