The core of my PBBG Engine consists of a Place and an Object. A Place is a spacial definition and can represent a room, world, universe, etc. An Object is anything that can reside within a place, meaning all people, monsters and items are Objects. The Places and Objects are defined using meta data so that properties of an Object are the meta data of the object. This meta data is stored in a seperate table from the object and retrieved as XML when an object is queried. Places work in much the same way with a few pre-defined fields such as the name and x, y, z location of the place. Going this route will allow me to have different objects defined in different games without having null database fields that are not used in all games.

Another example would be a Sword. In Perenthia a Sword dervies from Weapon which dervies from Thing which implements the Object interface required by the PBBG Engine in order to persist the properties of the Sword in the database. I can then create instances of the Sword class when Swords are crafted or purchased. Each level of inheritence can implement properties that will persist for each Sword instance created.

Sword : Weapon : Thing : IObject 

So far it seems to be working pretty well and with the XML features of SQL 2005 the querying of the data is very fast. I am hoping to get Perenthia ported over to this new framework soon as it will provide a more flexible system and allow me to manage game content a little easier.