Quick question: is it safe to assume all locally defined variables will initialize to zero?

And a tip for any noobs like myself trying to work with globals: you can set their initial states (and their constant status, which determines if they are included in a save game) in the "Gameplay -> Globals..." menu. I was trying to "right-click -> edit" them from the object menu, and getting an error, confusing the hell out of me.

yes.

Thanks. It came up as zero every time I checked, but a lifetime of C and the vagaries of uninitialized memory space has taught me never to trust that. ^_^

geckscript is usually straightforward like perl. But I guess I'll mention that there are a few things it is evil about, and when it gets evil, your script stops running in-game (we been calling that a 'script halt'). Most of the script halts I've ever gotten are when you take a REF variable, if you know what that is yet, and you expect that to actually have the script load a value into - - - but, there happens to be no REF ID gathered within the variable, so it's null, and ... you try to perform a script operation on that REF. It [censored] hates that and it dies without telling you why. So.... enjoy!!! heh.