Just wondering what the best set up is for arrays that will remain unchanged and be read by code during runtime.
I was considering XML for things like names of objects, dialogue, etc, but is there a preferred alternative as Unity doesn’t seem to parse XML out of the box? For example, putting a script on a game object in the first scene which defines the arrays inside void Start?
Monodevelop seems to offer database setup and creation, can these be used with Unity quite easily?
It depends on what you want. If you want easy to code, CSV is pretty easy. XML is not hard either and you have several XML classes/libraries available. In both cases, you’re reading text from a file (or via WWW) and if you’re not worried (or if you in fact depend) on that data changing (like hacked) then that’s fine.
If you want to ‘bake’ it into the game, what I’ve done in these cases is the same as the above, but make it an Editor script which reads the data into the structures on the desired component(s), and just Save Scene. Then you can see it in the Inspector to make sure it looks right, but you don’t have to ship those text files.