Crashing...
IVAN stopped letting me start new games. No, it didnt' just randomly start doing this out of the blue... Here's what I did: I went into the material.dat and define.dat files, and added two new materials (I named them Atomica and Woven Atomica; I was just screwing around, seeing if I could. I probably would have used more real-ish names if I'd been seriously trying to add a material). At first, they both worked perfectly. But, they glowed way to brightly, so I went back and toned that down; but then when I went back to IVAN it wouldn't let me start a new game. It would just crash. I havn't tried continueing; i have a save game, and i don't want to lose it. So. I reinstalled the game to the same directory, overwriteing everything. And of course... same problem.

When editing the script files, I've found that I have to frequently purge the save directory. It's usually because the game started blowing up on the bones files of a dungeon that wasn't meant to be. I'd recomend taking the saves you don't want away, and, if it still doesn't work, move those to a new directory and add them one by one untill it stops working. Then just delete the one that breaks it. The breaking one is probably the most recent one you made. In the future, it'll be best to extract to a second directory for editing.

Could you tell us a bit more about your system and copypaste your changes in the dat files here? Check that you don't have default name set, and that you don't always happen to use the same player name. This could cause the crash if the save game with that name was corrupt. And reinstall wouldn't correct this, you'd have to remove the save. Saves may sometimes become corrupted if you change the .dat files (but usually only if you add new monsters or something, not just because you alter the light emitation of a material) or use WMode to test these changes (namely, if you activate WMode, change the level and exit without saving and removing saves; this is actually quite an annoying bug, when I think of it I really don't know why I haven't yet fixed it :oops:). You could also try backuping your save elsewhere, wiping all files related to IVAN and trying again after a reinstall. (Oh, it seems SquashMonster already suggested the same thing while I was writing this msg...) We apologize for the inconvenience.

I managed to fix it on my own. I do have a default name set, but I never use more than one save file... I reinstalled to a different directory, and cut/pasted all my saves and bones to the new directory. Now the old one works fine. Woo, i'll use it for tinkering now... My materials (in case you were curious) were supposed to be a couple of hard, light-weight, glowing metals, one of which would be harder than the other, and the weaker one being more flexable. Worked out great, except for some reason they don't glow now, and I had accidentally set the weaker one's hardness at 2900, rather than 290... :P Now that I've figured out how to implement materials, lets see what I can do with items, and monsters and such...