Tearing my hair out

Ok, I fixed the issue I was having. I'm not really sure what the issue was, but it appears to be gone after a few modifications to the offending code. I can't really say I'm happy about the outcome. I haven't really changed anything fundamental, and I don't even know what the problem was in the first place.

Since I'm sure you're riveted to your seats, wondering what the bug was, I'll tell you. Maybe you can tell me what the cause was. When I changed the path of the program, it crashed. That is, the compiled program would work in the directory I compiled it to, no issues. But change the name of the directory the executable was in, or copy the directory to a different location (keeping the relative paths of the resources intact) and it would fail. Madness.

I did do a couple of things in the program that weren't very nice. I had a nested for loop and I needed to keep track of how many times I run the inner loop, so I declared a variable outside of the loop and incremented it inside the loop, as an index into a dynamically allocated array, then used it again outside after increasing it a couple of times.

The big change I did was not to use it outside the loop. My best guess is I was incrementing it by one more than the size of the array outside the loop, and overwriting some bit of memory that I shouldn't have been messing with. How that could possibly cause the program to work in the compilation directory but not when I changed it's name, I may never know. But then, that's what happens when you play with arrays, and one of the reason to avoid them when possible.

Unfortunately, OpenGL calls want you to give them raw pointers to arrays. I am doing well enough using smart pointers instead, but until I wrap them up in safer structures, some dangers remain. I should look into using vector, I think it might help. I'm just not sure I can get the pointer to the memory, or that vector has to pack the information in a certain manner. Arrays are ugly, but at least I have control over the packing of the bits in there, and that's what I need.

Now that it's working, however, I'm can get to working on something more important. Currently I'm using a noise function that unfortunately I can't easily reinitialize. Basically, I need to add a 'shuffle' function to rearrange the values in an array, which serves as the seed of the noise generator. Shouldn't be too difficult.

EDIT - Curse you, Skyrim! I'm afraid I got slightly sidetracked this past week. Good thing this scheduling thing works.