Web-Based Game Skill System

Question

Hello everyone,
I am currently developing a web-based game website using
Coldfusion 8 and MS SQL.
Until recentely, things have been going well. But I am now
stuck on a small issue of using an in-game skill system.
The way it works (or will work) is that your in-game
character will have a large library of skills to choose from, all
of which are accessible throughout the entire game. By choosing a
skill, your character will begin learning it over a set amount of
time (the time required for that specific skill). Your character
will, over time, generate it's own library of learnt skills - each
benefiting him or her within the game.
I hope this is all clear so far :)
So my small (but actually quite large) issue is that I'm not
sure how to go about storing this list of learnt skills.
My first instinct was to create a column within the
"characters" table in which the learnt skills would be stored as a
list, and then drawn out when actually listed on a page. But I have
heard that using lists within database tables isn't such a good
idea, and I would generally prefer another way around the issue.
My next idea was to create a table listing all of the
available skills as columns (a kind of library of every in-game
skill), then the characters would have a single row in that table
in which they have a "yes" or "no" under each skill column. These
yes or no answers would then be used to generate the library of
skills that character has. But this idea is very messy and I don't
even know how I could use this table in an SQL query...
I'd really like a simple and powerful solution for this
issue/problem, and I would be highly appreciative of anyone that
could help me!
Thanks in advance,
Aiden

Answer 1

"Thanks a lot for your reply anyway :) and I'm sorry it
wasn't of use
to me."
Actually Dan was guiding you down the correct database
normalization
path. What you have is a classic many-to-many join. You have
many
character records and many skill records and you want to join
them such
that a character can have 0-N skills (zero to infinity) and a
skill can
be used by 0-N players.
This is done with three tables. A character table with the
basic
details of a character and a skills table with the details of
the skills
and a joining table that connects the two. At a minimum the
join tables
simple consists of two fields, a foreign key field to the
characters
table and a foreign key field to the skills table. Thus for
each skill
a character has there will be one record connecting the two
id's
together. This joining table can easily be expanded to have
other data
about the character-skill join such as when it started, what
level the
character has reached in the skill, whatever else your system
needs.
An simple Example:
Character Table
ID Name
1 Joe
2 Sam
3 George
Skill Table
ID Name
1 Hunting
2 Cooking
3 Archery
Character_Skill Join Table
CharID SkillID
1 1
1 3
2 2
3 1
3 2
3 3
Thus with basic SQL join syntax we can synthesize the data
that Joe can
hunt and shoot arrows, Sam can cook and George can do it all.
HTH
Ian