Facepalm Programming

I spent over six hours of my life on Thursday trying to modify one of the older utility scripts.  I was initially pleased when I activated the script and saw the expected result, but I then grew perplexed when (upon further testing) saw variations in the results.  Some results were just plain wrong, and other conditions had no results at all.

I laced the script with multiple lines of diagnostic code, and ran it again.  And again.  I was not annoyed so much in that the script was not working as I was with the seemingly randomness of the results: I could not predict the result nor could I see the pattern within what was happening.  What the heck was going on with my beautiful script!  At no time did I dread "I broke the script," as my additional code was working perfectly: it was the original code that appeared to be misbehaving.  There was something larger happening that I was not seeing.

I turned to researching other scripts that had similar functionality.  What were their scripts doing that mine was not doing?  I could not see any differences, and my eyes began to tire from all of the reading.  I was about to end my debugging session when I had a sudden realization; within the World Editor Tool there are some "script check boxes" (for want of a better description) which basically set behavior preferences for a script's interaction with the world.  Did I have my check boxes checked?

Nope.  I had left one check box unchecked.  And after checking it, my script worked perfectly and predictably.

Oh brother.