Dialogue Editor Corrupting My Maps (Yes I Tried Hex Editing)

[XerxesQ]

I'm trying to work on a new Lugaru campaign with a bit of an emphasis on cinematic storytelling (or, in game design jargon, it's less ludological), so naturally I'm kind of interested in adding dialogues. And it works perfectly, I'm getting all the symbolic cinematography and timely cuts that would make my Editing professor proud, until I finish recording it. At that point, the dialogue plays itself to show me that it worked, and then everything but the skybox disappears. I can still call up the console and save, and I figured that was normal since the wiki says "Lugaru sometimes crashes after editing a dialogue but you can still call up the console and save then restart Lugaru."

Unfortunately, saving my map at this point corrupts it. I've had two cases where this happened, one in a map based on the raider camp where you find Skipper and another based on Challenge 4. The former just made Lugaru crash, the latter made it freeze, and since I can't Command-Tab out of the game I had to do a hard reset.

The second (hard reset-causing) map was the only one which I made a point of backing up before trying the dialogue, so I tried doing the documented hex editor fix (the one where you copy-paste 2F to 41 from the backup), and this didn't work.

I don't know what the problem is, so here's some random technical trivia that might shed some light:
- I have OS X 10.5.6 and a Santa Rosa (Intel) Macbook Pro
- Every map I tried this on was a sand map. This conversation just so happens to take place in a desert. I can rewrite the story if that's the problem, though.
- The dialogue is rather long; there are 26 boxes (not every one changes the camera angle), but it plays fine.
- I first tried dialogue type 41, then realized 31 might be better since this dialogue was for a cutscene level anyway. Both broke the map.
- There are two participants in the dialogue. No lines are 10 or 13 characters, though when I was first testing it I did have some issues with the file being parsed. I fixed this by copy-pasting Box 1 and Box 2 over and over and replacing the numbers/text with the subsequent boxes. I guess there were some stray invisible line breaks before, I don't know.
- I've always loaded the maps from the console as opposed to putting them into a campaign file first. I figured this would work since dialogues from the main storyline trigger correctly when I load their maps from the console.

I know other campaigns have been made, of course, so does anyone have an idea why it's breaking so much?

[Lotus Wolf]

you did remember to change the number of boxes specified at the beginning of the files to how many there are right? and dialogues can never be over 128 characters per box. other than that your good it seems.

[XerxesQ]

you did remember to change the number of boxes specified at the beginning of the files to how many there are right? and dialogues can never be over 128 characters per box. other than that your good it seems.

Did both. Dialogue Boxes: 26 at the beginning of the file, no line of text has more than 128 characters (the longest I have is 112). It plays fine when I load it into the map, but after I finish setting camera/head angles, it, without failure, replays the dialogue as if it were being triggered in-game (everything looks fine) and then the level, models, characters, everything disappears except for the HUD and the skybox.

Two possible things could be the cause somehow: the fact that I'm trying to reload the map from the console instead of a campaign, and the fact that I save the map with the player's position the same as the dialogue start position. Except that in both cases these causes seem to be completely illogical reasons for this to happen. Considering it takes me about two minutes to reboot every time the map gets corrupted, I'm not sure I want to try any more of my bright ideas unless someone suggests it'll fix anything.

Is David still around? He kind of made the game using the same tools...

[Count Roland]

he made the campaign using the tools, he made the game using c++ or something I don't remember, but yeah he is still around just pretty tied up in overgrowth, dialogues is the most common problem and I think they only work correctly on macs usually.