I'm hoping some of the technically proficient peeps here can help me. Astonishingly, after years of development I'm not subscribed to a single technical forum and I'm feeling a bit too lazy right now to sign up somewhere else, bookmark it and remember which of my hundreds of poorly categorised bookmarks it was.
I normally just search for other people's forum posts and associated answers because I find any question I may have has already been answered somewhere by someone and I'm a killer search guru. But this one has me flummoxed because I just can't come up with a precise enough search string to get the answers, so I'm hoping one of the techies here can provide the answers
Details and questions follow:
I'm writing a free game modding utility for players of the computer game Morrowind. I haven't actually played the game for over a year because the game mechanics are ultimately ill thought out and crappy, but it does have some unparalleled features such as a huge world and the ability to mod almost anything (with a truly crappy scripting language and a painful world editor) - and the massive modding community, which suffers from a paucity of real programmers, is always very grateful for new tools which is immensely rewarding.
Besides that I already wrote a powerful editing utility a year ago and never really finished the ideas I had for the codebase, so its kind of an itch I have to scratch. The editor is in widespread use and its quite intoxicating knowing that a lot of people are getting a lot of happiness from something you did. Side note: after doing the MW editor I came to realise that the motivation behind open source can be a lot more than simple altruism. It really feels good knowing hundreds of peeps are using your thing as an indispensable tool, regardless of whether you get cash for it or not.
The utility I want to write will import all the Morrowind object-oriented base data files and plugin data files on a persons PC into a database (basically lists of serialised objects), creating tables for each object type and allowing them to use SQL queries to manipulate masses of data, then export back to Morrowind plugin format.
Now being hopelessly disorganised, all I have left of my MS Developer Edition is a box. I suspect the disks, manuals and other shit is in the possession of my former business partner who, while a nice guy, is a magpie into who's cavernous cupboards flows all things computer related that have so much as sniffed his aura, especially stuff that his absent minded friend left at his place and never enquired about. Now, I can't even find the redistribution terms and conditions for MS Access. So I need to ask:
1. What's the deal with redistributing VB applications with the runtime version of MS Access databases? My understanding is that its free for redistribution if you've bought Office Developer Editon and for a coupla years I've operated on this principle with small clients. But I'm suddenly nervous because this is an app that will be distributed free worldwide via the net and I don't want MS tearing me a new one.
Basically my intention was to distribute a .mdb file and use Jet components to access the DB, avoiding the irritation of setting up ODBC shit. I don't want end users to have to do anything other than click "Set up -> Next -> Next -> Finish"
2. Are there any other small-footprint, small-download, SQL-queryable, royalty-free databases that can be freely redistributed with VB apps and don't require setting up extraneous shit or make that setting up automate-able (via a batch file, f'rinstance)?
Help?