Hello Steve!

I will try to answer your questions partially. I had a similar problem, I wanted to organise some rather complicated data structures for my game. In the past I solved this by simply writing a DLL with C++ and then I used this as a plugin. Worked for me, but you need the SDK for it - I am not sure if it is included in any edition (I have the Pro, therefore I have the SDK).

For my new project I tried to do eversything in Lite-C based on the fact that you can define your own data structures there. However I found it a little lacking for my needs - you can have an array of pointers to a self-defined data structure, but you cant initialize them properly. You can only initialise a global instance of the structure.

So, if you only need one or two instances of the struct (which can be arbitrarily complicated), Lite-C can do it. For other purposes I recommend plugging in a DLL in order to organise your data.

I hope this helped a little. Of course once you have the data and know what you want to do, creating the scene in 3D together with sounds etc. should be relatively easy with 3DGS.

Gnometech

EDIT: Although I have to admit that my C is a little rusted - I have not tried to just allocate some memory with "new". Maybe that works and that would solve all your problems - go for Lite-C. ;-)