Coding with Crowbars

As the development of my silly quest draws near its conclusion, I now turn my attention to modifying some of the existing world scripts to support this upcoming quest.

Even though I have plenty of experience in modifying scripts, I still grow a little nervous when shoe-horning new functionality into existing code.  Many of the basic world scripts are over a decade in age (the script which I am currently modifying was created in December of 1998), and I am constantly concerned of outright breaking a script, or changing a script to a point where it inadvertently affects all of its dependent scripts.  And I know that I am more cautious about breaking scripts than I need to be: our ServerGM has built a rock-solid system over the years which includes many failsafe systems, and the likelihood of tragedy happening is almost negligible.


Almost.

I have my crowbar in hand, and I return to prying away some old lines of code to make room for new code.  Making room is the easy part – it's the "make sure that nothing there gets bent out of place" which is harder.