There are numerous possible mistakes you could have made that might be breaking your mod. I will deal with two not-so-obvious general mistakes that might possibly be the source of the trouble. Make sure you explore other possible sources of errors, too.
Reviewing the syntax of your plain-text files might help. If you left out a closing quotation mark at the end of a text string, or omitted a comma somewhere, the erroneous plain-text file would crash the game. Sublime Text 2 is a good program for catching those mundane but tedious-to-locate syntax errors; it has a free demo version.
I can’t speak for any other possible sources of errors, but TextEdit might be
mis-formatting your plain-text output in a way that is hostile to the game.
Or, it could even be something as simple as TextEdit being set to create all of its output in RichText format (“.rtf” file extension")
instead of plain text (“.txt” file extension), when it’s very likely that the game can only accept .txt format.
Try the following troubleshooting workflow:
- Open TextEdit.
- Open the program’s Preferences.
- On the Preferences pane, look at the Format area.
- If the “Plain text” option is not checked, CHECK IT NOW.
- On the Preferences pane, look at the Options area.
- Note the following four options:
6A) “Smart copy/paste”,
6B) “Smart quotes”,
6C) “Smart dashes”,
6D) “Smart links”
7) If any of these are checked, UN-CHECK THEM.
8) Do not accidentally click the large “Restore All Defaults” button.
9) There is no “Save Preferences” button.
10) Quit TextEdit now. Your changes to preferences will be saved automatically when you quit.
What those “Smart…” features do also has a high likelihood of changing characters within your textfiles.
For example, something like an ordinary dash character ( “-” ) can wind up being changed without your knowledge to this one instead ( “–” ).
Even though both of those types of dashes look mainly identical to each other in a human-readable way, there IS a machine-readable difference between those two that could cause the game to fail when it tries to read any file with such altered characters in it.
Also, straight quotes (the " character) can likewise be changed and accidentally saved as curly quotes (the “ character); that’s another potential point of failure via TextEdit’s “Smart…” features. That’s why we’re turning all of those off which relate to TextEdit’s ability to automatically change characters.
After making the indicated changes to TextEdit’s preferences, you may possibly have to manually re-type all of your text files for your mod – re-typing every single dash and quotation mark – and then re-save all those files with your newly-modified version of TextEdit. If you have to do this, then make certain that you do not overlook any text files.
Again, I am not promising that this is the source of the error!
However, I have run into this same problem with Mac ports of some other games that were developed on the Windows platform, and which also happened to be extremely strict about proper syntax, AND which I had also used TextEdit for modding purposes in those games.
Good luck and good hunting!