Looking at the title, I bet most of you know what this entry will be about.

I have to say, first off, that I'm loving working on this project, because I'm learning so much. Such is the case with pointers. I consider myself pretty inexperienced when it comes to using them, so I'm always learning something new. Ofcourse, my programs have to crash 20 times before I learn the lesson[lol]

Today, I was writing some of the code for the grand overworld map. I realized that I'm not going to have the town be a seperate map, but rather a sub-map within the larger map of the world. Anyway, I had to write a routine that would iterate through the tile array, find any uninitialized tile pointers, and initialize them to the generic grass tile. So, I wrote the following code:



Pretty confident in myself, I went and compiled the program, and it compiled just fine(that's not entirely true, but besides the point). However, the program crashed over, and over, and over again.

Now, I always wondered when looking at C++ code, why do people bother to initialize a pointer to NULL. Surely the pointer must already be set to NULL by default! Oh, how naive I am.

Long story short, I learned this lesson the hard way, but eventually fixed the problem. Now I've learned the fairly obvious lesson, you actually have to initialize a pointer to NULL to compare it to NULL.

Anyway, I'm pretty anxious to get the player code working so I can walk around in the game world.

MapColumnCount = 25;
MapRowCount = 19;
MapLayerCount = 3;

for(int nLayer = 0; nLayer < MapLayerCount; ++nLayer)
{
    for(int nRow = 0; nRow < MapRowCount; ++nRow)
    {
        for(int nColumn = 0; nColumn < MapColumnCount; ++nColumn)
        {
            int nCurrentTile = ((nRow * MapColumnCount) + nColumn) + ((MapColumnCount * MapRowCount) * nLayer);
            // lol, I'm pretty sure that's right, but I'm not positive.
            // It's something like that.
        }
    }
}