Current thoughts on the project...
I really want to do this project! I’m busy with my education at the moment and its only going to get worse over the next 2 years. I have 3 months in summer for a break which I can use to do some real work on projects such as this.
If im serious about this project which I am I should really treat it seriously. I want this project to go from strength to strength and keep being developed for years to come. So why waist time, why not save my self time? Eventually the project should be web based which is the easiest way to make the game multi-platform. The game requires a large store of data, in other words; a database, and what is the best open source database around? MySQL! So it makes perfect sense that I use it for the game's database. MySQL database's can be accessed by all sorts of means, web applications, windows/linux applications, irc bots etc.
Also I am using the old version of Visual Basic, version 6. The new flavour of Visual Basic is called VB.Net and now the second version of that (2005) is called once again just VB. I’m not a great programmer of VB6 but I know I could create OPCW server & client with it. It makes more sense for me to learn the latest version than to continue with the old and get better with that when I could be getting better at the latest version.
Using MySQL would mean when I (or someone else) want to develop a new version of OPCW server (or another application for OPCW) they would be using a highly supported database format. Also it is more likely that VB developers would want to use the latest version than the old.
I have done a lot of work (about 75 hours) but I've only touched the surface of the project so far. I think rewriting it will be well worth the effort.
I want to get it right the first time, and if that means it will be a slower process then so be it.