May do that, though my C++ is about 5,000 times worse than my Perl. lol Basically, my total exposure to C++ has been 4 weeks in a class called "current concepts", in which we barely touched on OOP, and that was... 15+ years ago. It was literally the year *prior* to them changing the curricula for Devry to have C++ and Windows as part of the main course work. Instead, it was all heavily based on COBOL, JCL, some vague DOS prompt emulation of *nix, which didn't actually go into any of how the OS did anything. The most advanced thing was the networking class, which I almost didn't pass because a) my lab partner bailed on me to do his stuff during lunch, without telling me, and b) it was using those old Coax systems, where if you fracking sneezed wrong it would fry the transceiver chip on the card... Guess what happened when I tried it, due to the stupid plug not being switched on on the work bench.
Now, VB, Java, Lua, which has a lot of the same neat stuff with arrays/tables as Perl (as of about... 72 hours ago), a smattering of some others, Pascal (from highschool), and of course COBOL 74, those I know, to various degrees, but C++ I never got into because a) it looked like spaghetti to me, and b) I hate trying to debug stuff without decent tools, and the only decent tools for C++ tend to all be expensive, especially if trying to code for Windows, where you also need all the libraries and macros (same dif...) for the APIs.
MS recently crowed about how, "No expert wants to see our code, they just want stable libraries and correct documentation of the APIs." Well, until now I wasn't too sympathetic to this, though mainly due to the fact that MS has *never* produced stable anything, or produced complete, never mind correct, documentation for it.
This case has given me some sympathy towards this position. Knowing how the data ends up looking *before* it gets handled by the Perl code would have prevented a long mess of errors, confusion and stubborn insistence that, "It just can't work!!" lol
Hmm. On a side note, I think I dropped this question in some place else, but it didn't get answered. Are globals automatically added to the DB when something sets them, or do they have to be defined *before*, loaded during start up, then get updated automatically some how? I would love to help fix some of the buggy stuff in some quests, especially the Shar Vahl area, including the citizen quest, but the fix requires one NPC, Bindarah, to be able to check in the client has done the quest successfully, in order to recreate the slate you receive from it (which needs to be handed in to other NPCs, who return it, for a lot of the faction quests). A lot of other things are messed up in there, like pathing, some mob spawn locations, the guards and npcs killing encroaching monsters, the fact that one at least in Shadeweaver seems to have a spawn glitch, so they are like 5 copies I have *seen* of him, when there should only be one (no idea how or why that is happening..). Well, its a disaster imho, and most of it I probably can't fix, but with the quest lines also kind of broken, and nothing checking to make sure you are not incorrectly handing in items you *must* have for later quests, its also close to unplayable.
That much, I can probably help to fix some of. The key quest though, will require the use of a global, to determine which part(s), of the main quest you have completed, so you can successfully fix yourself if you do something stupid, like throwing out your slate or cloak, or handing them to something that doesn't want them, and/or doesn't correctly return them (though, I thought there was a 'no-drop' that could be used to prevent the former).