I am creating a database for an achievement system (like something you would see in a Blizzard game). I would like to have a GUI that displays the current progress of all achievements in the game which means I will need to query the progress of all achievements for a user in order to populate the GUI. I plan on having somewhere around 100 achievements.
This brings about a design question. What is the best way to design the database and querying code to query the progress of ~100 bit fields?
It seems like the brute force method would be to get the entire row of achievements and then for each field in the row do some hardcoded string comparison to determine which achievement we are dealing with.
Another possible solution may be to have a big switch statement based on the column index of the table and handle each achievement for each case (requires not modifying the table or you have to refactor a lot of C++ code).
I’m curious to hear any other designs you guys may have for this.
Thanks!
I suggest building a solution using 3 tables. These tables are users, achievements and user_achievements. A user would be identified with a u_id in the users table. An achievement would be identified with a a_id in the achievements table. You would then keep track of users achievements by inserting a row in the user_achievements table that includes a u_id to identify the user and a a_id to identify the achievement. The user_achievements table would also contain a column that would specify the % completion of that achievement for the given user.