The wiki tells you most of what you need to know, but here are some hints I didn't find in it that may make your life easier. There's a great Dedit how-to somewhere in here for PC users.
Installing Dialogues on a Mac
I first recommend starting by loading Challenge Maps and clearing one each of grass, desert, and snow entirely, erasing characters, patrol paths, and any objects you don't want. Now use those to build all your maps in. I had inconsistent luck using the ddialogue trick to erase dialogue, so starting with non-dialogue Challenge maps might save you having to remake a whole map.
Most of the trouble I had was eventually traced back to some tiny typing error in the dialogue file.
I had the best luck using a working dialogue for a template to make the new one.
1: I'd get a dialogue that I KNEW was written right, like one from someone else's finished campaign.
IMPORTANT UPDATE, Feb 13, 2011: For some reason, TextEdit sometimes pops up a dialogue script that you know to be functional in game-- but it opens it peppered with a whole bunch of //'s and \\'s (like after every single line in the script) and big, multi-line extra heading descriptive bits about fonts and such. I have no idea what that's about, but there must be ALMOST NONE of that for a script to install. The only place a \ is used is to mark where a sentence goes to the next line in the visible text box on the screen ingame. The only header should be the number of boxes.
My ancient ppc mac never opened a TextEdit page of dialogue with this 50+ \\\'s problem, but so far it's been one of the reasons for dialogue-fail in every single one of the files that desperate modders have sent me. Wtf, I can't tell ya, but there it is.
DIALOGUE SCRIPT HAS TO LOOK EXACTLY LIKE THIS (no more, no less!):
Dialogue boxes: 4
Box 1:
Location: 1
Color: 0.2 0.0 0.0
Name: Hawk
Text: Didn't Skipper say there was some crazy fighter\bunny in his village?
Sound: 1
Box 2:
Location: 2
Color: 0.0 0.0 0.0
Name: Cypress
Text: Yeah, but Skipper set a trap for him; he must be\dead by now.
Sound: 6
Box 3:
Location: 1
Color: 0.2 0.0 0.0
Name: Hawk
Text: I certainly hope so. I don't think he'd appreciate\what you did with his wife.
Sound: 1
Box 4:
Location: 2
Color: 0.0 0.0 0.0
Name: Cypress
Text: Too bad he wasn't there to see it; I'd love to see\the look on his face.
Sound: 4
2: Then I'd delete all but the 1st 3 or 4 little "paragraphs" (or "dialogue Boxes") and the header.
3: Then I'd just change the name, color, location, chirp sound and actual dialogue to what I wanted. Careful to keep EVERYTHING in the template exactly as it was-- spaces between numbers, colons, lines, between "dialogue Boxes", etc. If you're using TextEdit, make sure your dialogue file is saving as Plain Text, not some new-fangled Mega Super Text. Don't bother to change the Box #'s , you'll do that at the end.
(btw, I had problems with copy/pasting dialogue lines from a typed script I wrote. For some reason, it was always happier when I typed it in fresh. Go figure. That 10 or 13 letter dialogue glitch mentioned in the wiki is absolutely true, and the workaround works.)
4: Copy and paste the first finished dialogue Boxes down the page as you need them, changing sounds and dialogue box position as you like. This is actually quite handy, since you don't need to change everything in the Boxes-- If you have a conversation between Turner and Skipper, or whatever, you've already got most of your work done after the first two lines of dialogue. This also helps to keep your colors consistent if you are assigning colors to the boxes for individual characters.
5: When you've got all the dialogue Boxes written, go back to the top and carefully change the Box number on each one so they're in order.
6: Now change the number in the header at the top to match the number of dialogue Boxes you made.
IMPORTANT!: At the very end of the last dialogue Box, your cursor must be right up against the very last letter, and you need to delete all blank spaces and blank lines you may have pasted after that letter. You can test if you left any by trying the down or right pointing arrows-- they should have no effect at all. If they move the cursor, keep pressing 'til it stops, then delete until you're back at the end of your last typed letters.
ALSO IMPORTANT: When you finally successfully install the dialogue into the map, with all your camera angles and head movements, etc., the screen should freeze with nothing but the skybox visible or some other alarming thing. DON'T PANIC. This is good. *TYPE:save mapname in the console and hit enter. Exit all the way out of Lugaru to your desktop, then restart the game. Your dialogue should be installed when you reload the map.
*{better check the wiki on this in case I'm remembering it wrong!!}
Whew. I know that looked long, but once you start on it, it gets pretty routine and fast. I'd make a couple of quick tests on maps with just a few bunnies and no particular effort. If you want to have multiple conversations on one map, say, two that don't start a fight, and the third that does, make sure you test that on a throwaway map with very short dialogues. The bunnies are numbered in the order you spawned them, so make sure you shoot your hero walking up to #3 if your conversation is supposed to happen when you walk up to #3! The very first scene in Ancestral Tales drove me crazy because I couldn't ever remember which characters were which spawn #, and there were 8 npc's.
