No LOD?

[Ken L]

Whenever I switch to the abilities tab of my spellcasters, it takes an unbearably long amount of time to load due to the size of the spell lists. Does FG do any kind of load on demand?

Also I noticed that the entire database is in fact XML.. is the database XML parsed on demand in this case? Is it in fact flat data storage? I always figured there would be some kind of SQL backend but now the load times make sense.

[damned]

Whilst a SQL backend could have many advantages it would make the installation source significantly more complex.
Cross platform compatibility challenges would increase significantly and backup strategies would probably have to be built into the system
There are enough challenges for many users with the current application complexity

[Ken L]

In the current model, it's what we have to work with. In the modernization with the unity push, the possibility of a built-in database should be an agenda item. As far as extensions are concerned, the DB is built internally by FG so there's already a layer of abstraction to the API used by extensions. Switching to a SQL or SQL-less backing store should bring a welcome speed boost for access.

This isn't nitty critty details/features, this is the heart of the machinery that can greatly benefit.

[Moon Wizard]

We will be looking at optimizing the in-memory database characteristics of FG with the next generation we are working on.

The XML is purely a mechanism for saving/loading the data between sessions. Ultimately, the data in FG can be represented by tree-based structures. These do not translate in a simple way to relational tables, so we will be exploring our options.

Cheers,
JPG