Tell me about the data dumper, please, brother. The aforementioned hacker friend said that there was a capacity for hash-dumping, and if the first draft of the program is to retain the current way of handling the data, such a facility would be ideal. I've tried to find out about this before, and failed. (Don't say 'use Super Search', because I'm wasting office time on this thread already, and I don't have a home connection ... yet. I'll do a proper search for all these things later - I greatly appreciate the input of my fellow monks right now. Bless you all.)

1) Ok, I believe you all about use strict. :-)
2) This is clearly what I have to learn next.

3) Absolutely. It struck me that I'm going to have to recode the room data by hand, because I'm going to want the olfactory, visual, auditory and tactile/environmental data of each room to be accessible in bits, to allow for the spells blindness and deafness, not to mention darkness and other environmental effects. Clearly, using a format that will enable me to add other such elements later without another re-write is essential.

Thanks!

Tiefling