Editing dll: What do I do with these errors?

[MFAnother94]

Hi. Trying my hand at modding. So I've been editing info on the dll files. But sometimes I'd run into errors in places I didn't even touch. For example in the screenshot below, I just renamed "Saber-toothed Cat" into "Smilodon". When I saved my changes, an error popped up at the lines and characters pertaining to the Asian Elephant, which I made no changes to.

 

What do I do in these situations? Thank you in advance!

[Fern]

From Jay: It looks like you are using Resource Hacker to edit ZT's lang100.dll. That screenshot shows lines were split when they should not be. The numbers on the left are the line numbers. So line 4 is:
35081,    "Adopt an Asian elephant. Asian elephants live in medium-sized herds. Asian
Line 5 is:
elephants prefer the foxtail palm tree."
So the error is saying that line 4 is not ending with double quotes, which is a correct error message. I do not know how you managed to cause all of those lines to be split. Maybe you used copy/paste for the lines. Or maybe you have some Resource Hacker option set that I do not have set. The way it should look is line 4 should be:
35081,    "Adopt an Asian elephant. Asian elephants live in medium-sized herds. Asian elephants prefer the foxtail palm tree."

So if you merge the lines again so that each line ends with double quotes, Resource Hacker will allow it to compile without error. However, that is not what should be done. It is always bad to edit the ".dll" files that come with ZT. People did that in the early days of ZT and it eventually caused sporadic crashing. The correct approach is to create a new ".dll" file that has only the changes you want. The name of the ".dll" file is important because ZT has to read all of the ".dll" files in an order that would cause your messages to override ZT's messages, while not overriding override messages by others. I recommend the file name lang999--MFAnother94Overrides.dll. Your block 2193:1033 in that ".dll" would look like these 5 lines:
STRINGTABLE
LANGUAGE LANG_ENGLISH, SUBLANG_ENGLISH_US
{
  35086,    "Adopt a Smilodon. Saber-toothed Cats live in small to medium-sized families called prides. Saber-toothed Cats use their saber-like canine teeth to hunt fast moving animals."
}

[MFAnother94]

Hmm...so making a new .dll is better? And only containing the things I want to change? I'll try that. So since I'm only renaming or editing names of animals and/or their descriptions and not making any new animals or objects, the name of my file is the one that makes it override the original game's dll?

 

Then where will I put this new .dll if ever? Thanks!

[Fern]

From Jay: Yes, a new ".dll" is better. Yes, it should only contain the things you want to change. Yes, the name of a ".dll" file affects the order that ZT reads the ".dll" files, determining what overrides what. As an example, lang100.dll has messages in it that override messages in lang0.dll. In fact, the 35081 message in your screenshot is one message where lang100.dll overrides the one in lang0.dll. They changed "a Asian elephant" to "an Asian elephant". You would put your new ".dll" in ZT's main folder, which is the one that has lang0.dll and lang100.dll. All ".dll" files for ZT have to be in that folder.