Best way to store\retrieve simple textual data?

For example, in an RPG you might want to store a list of weapons, with their various attributes, names of their models and textures, etc. What is the preferred way of accomplishing this in unity?

We do a lot of this in XML (System.Xml). Most of the missions on our games have models (domain models not 3D models) of at least one kind or another and the System.Xml stuff is very easy to use and bind to your model classes to feed your game. To store the data you can also put the XML files in asset bundles (as text assets) and slurp them off the disk or across the wire using the WWW class and parse the text bytes in the game. You can build them into the game by putting them into a folder in the project name “Resources” and use the Resources.Load to pull them in. This makes the data baked into the game at build time though as opposed to having the ability to get new configurations via the asset bundle functionality.

I am not a huge XML advocate but it is the most supported common interchange format. I would love to attempt YAML or JSON to write the configuration files as XML is so verbose. Most of those libraries are open source and we have not had a chance to test them out since some of them look to be unmaintained. We have not noticed any significant overhead but we keep the parsing to specific parts of the game… you don’t want to parse it ‘during’ the game.