DjUnique's Arcanum modding tools update

Sure, I'll try to get the parser to separate the header from the first dialogue node somehow. Will take some time, I suppose because it's not a hand-written parser, but rather generated with CoCo/R for Delphi (which is one of my favourite tools for creating parsers for all kinds of purposes, even for very simple text formats such as DLG and MES). I got the other comment stuff working properly so comments will be fully preserved.

As I said before, this only affects dialogue files that have not been previously saved with ScriptEd. I'm still trying figure this out but I can't because there's nothing that can distinguish a node header from the comments of node 1 because linebreaks are being ignored by the parser. This is going to slow down the release of the first beta, otherwise I would have already posted the link to the installer.

 

Problem solved... finally. Now the dialogue parser unit will separate the header and the comments of the first node by attempting to replace two consecutive blank comment lines with a special keyword 'ENDHEADER' which will then help separate the comment sections... So you need to have something like this in the dialogue:

and it ends up like this:

and presto: we got a header text up until the ENDHEADER keyword and the comments of the first node will be in the correct place.

Unfortunately some manual editing may still be required ibut this is pretty much the best I can do.

 

Once there is a release, I am sure I can comment further on its effectiveness.

If the new release of ScriptEd's dlg and scr editing functions work right, I'm sure the comments will start to be written using that program, and not so much with notepad/wordpad or other dlg editing programs, so hopefully conversion won't be as much of an issue before too long.