Hey guys.

I'm working on creating a flexible and reusable OOP RPG system, with characters, stats, items and so on.

As I plan to be able to create and import as many items as one would want in such a game, a big question that has come up is how to best store the various items' names and effects.

Say i have a Party Class, which contains a character object/array, and a Inventory object/array.
Say i open a chest and call party.inventory.addItem( new Item("Boots", 1);

the Item Class is a base class that is usually extended into differrent classes like Weapon, Armour or UsableItem, with appropriate properties for each.

SO; how could i best store these "items" before i add them to the inventory?
store them in a single xml, or one xml for each item type (weapon.xml, armour.xml), or do I create a single .as file with all the existing item objects to possibly choose from, or one .as for each type of item?

This based on the stats for a Weapon item for example being:
name:String = "Bastard Sword"
power:uint = 12
class:String = "sword"
attackType:String = "physical"
pic:String = "com/rpg/items/bastard_sword.png"
(also, is that the best way to go? Having external images for items? Having separate movieclips for each item with a different picture seems, frankly, ridicilous)

I've looked around but can't find anything in regards to flash on this subject.