Thanks for the suggestions, gave me some things to practice and think about.

I have two reasons for using an ID string: One, file format. It just seems like it would be easier to parse one string than several object variables, and there are several more properties than the ones I listed (the member variables I used were mostly for example purposes, and might not remain). Two, it's useful for lookup/indexing purposes. I could hold all this in one text file like so:
0002304563797
0274821034876
1002182722453
1217785499821
etc.

Then to load an object I just use a getline() function.

Keep in mind, these ID formats are just for object types, not multiple instances of them. The instances get their own file:

The Roadkiller 2500
0347356823 (a green american jeep with two automatic turrets that shoot bees and runs on Mr. Pibb)
"This vehicle was built during the desktop wars by Azurecat, who thought he knew what he was doing."

If I wanted to find all objects of type "jeep" I'd just use
while (!EndOfFile)
{
if (object[0] = '03')
{
LoadObjectToBuffer(); //or something like that.
}
NextLine();
}
[/quote]

Looking for instances of objects would be much clearer with strings. To find all objects of type jeep, you would use something like (this is a conceptual example, it won't compile, btw)


for(int i =0; i < array.Length(); i++)
{
if (objectArray.type == jeep)
return objectArray.name;
}


Above I assumed that you are checking through things at runtime. To load things from a file would require a function to do so first, and then place each object in an array. But that's not going to be very difficult to do, and you'd still have to create that function if you use IDs.

For a pick-and-choose generator, would using globals be a bad idea?
bool g_fKeepColor = false;
bool g_fKeepType = false;
bool g_fKeepGuns = false;
etc.

Then I'd call
int GenerateVehicle(sVehicle obj)
{
int i = 4; //for string array access

if (g_fKeepColor == false)
{
obj.ID = rand();
}
i++;

if(g_fKeepType == false)

{
obj.ID = rand();
}
i++;
//and so on.
}


All I have to do is set my globals (which will likely be done with checkboxes or drop down listboxes).
[/quote]

I'm not sure how this code is supposed to work. However, you don't need globals for this. You can make a random vehicle generator function that uses temporary variables to set each property, and then returns a completed random vehicle object. You can pass properties as arguments to the function, in case you don't want the vehicle to be completely random (I'm assuming that this is what the listboxes/checkboxes would be for). You can load these completed objects into an array, and there's no need for you to try and set your own index. If you're trying to set each property of a vehicle as a value an array, you don't need to. The object already will have each variable you just need set it by name (Object.type = RandGen(type)).

I still have quite a bit to figure out, but this is basically how I figured it'd work. You mentioned using a function with multiple parameters to set which values I wanted to keep, where you referring to a constructor? If so I could probably give each object it's own Vehicle.fKeepWhatever variables, with it's own RandomGen() function. It just seems like unnecessary overhead at first glance, but then again I'm new to the OO design end of things.
[/quote]

You could overload a constructor for a RandomGen function which can accept arguments for some properties and randomizes the rest. Or you could create a separate function that generates values for each property and then passes those values to a more generic constructor. There are lots of potential approaches, which one you take is a matter of style and taste.

However, all of these approaches will be roughly the same between the result of a parsed ID or a string as far as implementation. But parsing is still going to be a huge pain, and parsing the ID is what will produce unnecessary overhead.