[TopAce]

I'm creating a long dialog-only mission, and I'm already at 60 messages, and I still have a couple of conversations to script. Is there a maximum number of mission messages?

[Rodo]

not that I'm aware of, but be careful with the length of the messages.

[dragonsniper]

About a year back I had a mission that used around 50-70 messages and IIRC, I had no problems.

[karajorma]

Birth of a Legend for BtRL had over 150 so whatever the limit is it's pretty damn high. I'd check but I'm not at my PC at the moment. On 3.6.10 builds and below there may be a 500 message total limit too. This is the limit for your mission messages + the number of messages in messages.tbl (around 300).

[TopAce]

That's very high. Why would anyone need that many messages?

[karajorma]

Dynamic missions is the easiest explanation. The more ways there are of playing a single mission the more dialogue you might need for it.

[Scotty]

Indeed.  Sometimes even the most minor changes have to be accounted for in message trees.

For example, if you had a cruiser in mission, the GTC Bob, that would be replaced by the GTC Steve if it were destroyed, it wouldn't make much sense to have all the messages in the mission operate under the assumption the GTC Bob would survive the whole mission.  Nor does it make sense for the GTC Steve to have to jump in in the first minute or so.  Depending on when the Bob was destroyed, the messages would change.  If the Bob is destroyed by SEXP, that's great, but if not, you would have to duplicate all messages that reference one of those names.  When that happens in missions I FRED, that usually increases the amount of messages for just those craft by about 50%. The increase expands almost geometrically if you have more than one ship or group that can be destroyed while the mission is still a success.

[Goober5000]

The message limit was quite high, but in the recent builds, it has been completely removed.  You can now have as many messages as your computer's memory will support.