Hey All,

As a newbie gamer developer, i was wondering if someone can give me advice on the following.

I'm trying to develop a simple multiplayer first person game using a client server architecture and c++ language which will prove the concept of distributed dynamic terrain (the ability for a gamer to realistically interact with an object and ensure that any effects of the interaction are distributed across the network). Basically when one gamer on the network triggers off an event by user input, the object is required to change its attributes and/or state within the server database and distribute this to other gamers on the network to keep the shared gaming world consistent.


At the moment i'm stuck on:
1) How to represent objects within the gaming environment?
I'm thinking of attributes and possible meta states
Is there a good way to organise it such that these object are easily searchable within the database?
2) What kinds of data need to be transmitted over the network?
3) Is there any free distributed object oriented databases around that are available to download?

Regards and many thanks in advance,
khanage