Oh my

Since my last post, the one about game design that included a discussion about using XML, I took another run with Microsoft's XNA studio. In particular the RPG toolkit.

Can you guess how it stores all of it's quest, item and character data?

Yup. XML. I'm building it at the moment, using the "release" configuration. For science!

While waiting I may as well say something useful... ho-hum. ICO is great, though I think I preferred Shadow of the Colossus.

When I saw that my counter had reached over 2000 hits I had a look at my stats again. Some interesting ones. I get regular searches through google, and some hits from Wikipedia. My main traffic comes from the Nosgothic Realm, which is fair enough. However, I've also been linked to through a quick-search on Facebook and Google's Orkut beta, which is basically Google's answer to Facebook. It looks a bit interesting.
Also, I've gotten hits to the main page without a referring link from someone in Japan using the "@home Network Japan" ISP. Sam, is that you?

There we go, build done... The XML files are transformed into Microsoft's own standard, XNB files... which are non-unicode files, so difficult to mess with.
On the one hand it is good - if you were to design an RPG and then give it to people, you wouldn't want it to be essentially you giving them the engine, leaving them able to mess with the data. That would be a bit pointless.
However it also makes it a bit more difficult - for example, if you wanted to create an RPG which was extendible, so people could make mods for it. Even if you didn't want to let them mess with your stuff, you might still want them to be able to add things. You would then need to make the program in such a way that it could also read the external files added by users, which may or may not be difficult.