Shipping static data with an iPhone app

Question

I'm making a game and I need to be able to ship some data about the game's various ships and details about them that the app will use. I'm looking for what the ideal way to do this would be. Now I've narrowed it down to using either SQLite, Core Data, or Property Lists. Now the thing I want to keep in mind as well is memory. Because it's a game I need to be careful about this and because of the fact Property Lists need to be loaded all into memory I'm afraid they might not be ideal. I know SQLite is supposed to have better performance than that and I've heard that Core Data performs even better than that. So my question is what do you think the best way to ship static data with an iPhone app is?

Answer 1

I would say it depends on the amount of data that you need to provide. If it is a lot of a data, I would definitely go for sqlite. If it is just a couple of ships, sqlite might be a little over the top.

Answer 2

For a such a small amount of data why dont you consider writing your own file format, or using something easy to parse such as csv, will be easy to edit in any spreadsheet program, and to cut down filesize / load times convert it into a binary format.

Answer 3

Assuming that not all ship-data is needed at the same time (and as such, having them all in one file would be a waste): Maybe you should use a separate data file for each ship or each class of ships?

Since this would solve the storage-efficiency at a different level, plists might be a viable option.