City of Heroes: Live Forum Archive

Character Descriptions Still Deny Line Breaks

Aisynia

By Aisynia,
Posted on: 2009-05-27 15:37 in The Global Training Room Test Server

 

Posted

As of the current patch on test, I15, when you submit changes to your character's description any line breaks are lost. Your description appears as a single (potentially long) paragraph. Ending a sentence with a line break causes it to run on directly into the next sentence with no whitespace at all.

A character with existing line breaks keeps them unless you enter the character info screen, which causes them to be lost with no way to confirm or abort.

Please revert this to the old pre-I14 behavior, which allowed line breaks. For anyone with a carefully written character discription, this is really crap.

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Posted

Just remember. Pesky little things like RP tools are not really a priority for the Devs.

 

Posted

This is not an "RP tool," its a basic, common-sense QoL issue that makes people's character info easy to read.

It has screwed up several of my character's bio sheets in the live game, and made me afraid to even open my Info sheets on others, lest I inadvertently turn said bio into mush by accidentally hitting the space bar once.

You don't even need a 'carefully written bio" for this to affect you; as long as you have two or more lines, it can make your bio sheet look like trash.

Fix yesterday, please.

 

Posted

[ QUOTE ]
Just remember. Pesky little things like RP tools are not really a priority for the Devs.

[/ QUOTE ]
While I might (sadly) agree that it's not a priority for the Devs to ADD new "RP tools" what we are talking about here is fixing a feature that's been in the game from Issues 0-13 and got BROKEN. While there are people out there who don't care about character descriptions to some people this bug is as bad as if several ATs and/or powersets were randomly removed from the game.

If the Devs can't give us many new QoL things they shouldn't allow existing features to disappear either.
I don't really want to play a game that ends up LOSING capabilities over time...

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Posted

A million times YES. But I heard they took away formatting because it was an exploit of some kind. Apparantly some people were farming paragraph spaces and the developers became concerned that some people wouldn't be able to attain that many spaces so they took them away completely.

 

Posted

[ QUOTE ]
While I might (sadly) agree that it's not a priority for the Devs to ADD new "RP tools" what we are talking about here is fixing a feature that's been in the game from Issues 0-13 and got BROKEN.

[/ QUOTE ]

It's fairly clear from the last several issues that the text display system (to the extent that it is valid to describe it as a "system", which is unclear) is a mess. IIRC *every* time they have made a change to it, there was some sort of unintended consequence or bug that popped up.

This certainly looks like the result of a system that was written by someone who is no longer there, or possibly no longer working in that area and too busy to go back and deal with their old code. It has accumulated hacks by people who didn't really understand the code, and this has left it in a fragile mess.

Some of the problem probably comes from an original design that thought of text as basically an ASCII stream of "passive" data. This has been mangled over the years to bring it to a more HTML-like (and influenced) design where text is a "live" stream containing a mix of data, formatting instructions, and complex external calls. The mentality shift between a "text handling system" and a system where the text "handles" itself, but needs a variety of supporting routines to let it reach its full potential, is a lot more significant than most people give credit for.

It's highly likely that hasty fiddling with paragraphs will break the MA text fields again, since the original error came from fiddling with how the MA text fields processed pseduo-HTML and line breaks. This was changed around several times in I14 Open Beta, breaking people's arcs. Breaking people's arcs in live MA is bad, so hasty changes here are not a good idea.

Unfortunately, working on text processing is "not sexy", and tends to be pushed way down the priority list by owners, developers, and programmers. This is particularly true when you consider that CoH has an unusual situation compared to most MMORPGs, where there is significant persistent text that is "owned" by players (bios, MA text, etc.).

The hope is that they realize the problem, and have either hired or assigned someone to rewrite or at least clean up the text system(s) as part of the big Going Rogue cleanup. It's possible that part of the "character creator 2.0" rumored for GR includes an entirely new or rewritten text system for bios among other things, and that they don't want to waste time trying to fix something that is known to be twitchy and has already been replaced in the builds they're working with internally.

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Posted

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]

The hope is that they realize the problem, and have either hired or assigned someone to rewrite or at least clean up the text system(s) as part of the big Going Rogue cleanup. It's possible that part of the "character creator 2.0" rumored for GR includes an entirely new or rewritten text system for bios among other things, and that they don't want to waste time trying to fix something that is known to be twitchy and has already been replaced in the builds they're working with internally.

[/ QUOTE ]

That is the hope. I would just like some redname confirmation on any of the few threads about this issue. That it is known about and being addressed.

 

Posted

[ QUOTE ]

Please revert this to the old pre-I14 behavior, which allowed line breaks. For anyone with a carefully written character discription, this is really crap.

[/ QUOTE ]

co-sign.

it's annoying enough trying to edit anything with the buggy pile of a text editor they stick us with, having irritating, painstaking formatting erased is just unacceptable.

I haven't had such trials with formatting since the dark days of pre-WYSIWYG word processing....it's 2009, for the love of pete!

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Posted

[ QUOTE ]
http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showflat....=0#Post13547504


http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showflat....e=2&fpart=1

I dunno what else you can do except 5 star these threads and place a post in it to keep it on the front pages. I think it should get fixed as soon as possible, also.

[/ QUOTE ]

Personally, I feel it should be stickied to the front page of every forum until it is fixed. I 5-starred this thread on my other account, too.

 

Posted

[ QUOTE ]
A million times YES. But I heard they took away formatting because it was an exploit of some kind. Apparantly some people were farming paragraph spaces and the developers became concerned that some people wouldn't be able to attain that many spaces so they took them away completely.

[/ QUOTE ]
It's all about the badges... I love the Master Formatter and Line Feeder badges.

 

Posted

You know what I'd -really- want after they eventually fix this big?

A "back" button on the Character ID screen. Once you enter that screen, the only way out is saving the changes. So if you screw up, it's done.

CoH is -PLAGUED- with QoL issues like this. And the bugs make it even worse.

I mean...the market interface is...oh god. The nightmares. I was actually surprised by how 'smooth' and user-friendly the MA interface came out to be.

 

Posted

I sign this, it is an issue that needs to be fixed!

 

Posted

In fact, this bug has been present since I14 live. It SOUNDS like, from the OP, that they actually fixed it on test, and then borked it again. If that's the case, hopefully the fix will be reimplemented in the next patch.

Because yes, this was, is, and continues to be REAL DARN ANNOYING.

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Posted

[ QUOTE ]
In fact, this bug has been present since I14 live. It SOUNDS like, from the OP, that they actually fixed it on test, and then borked it again.

[/ QUOTE ]

No, to my knowledge this was never fixed on test. Yes, it has been broken since I14.

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Posted

...This bug (and I do feel it's a bug) drives me nuts. A bio that is perfectly readable and sensible becomes suddenly intolerable when all the lines are squished together, IMO. Walls of text are never fun, paticularly when not intended.

 

Posted

Some dev response to this issue would be much appreciated, just so we know it will be looked at.

 

Posted

This is a very annoying issue to me too. I've given up on writing bios for all my characters at this point, and just put "Will enter bio when they fix this stupid bug!"

It's frustrating to not be able to actually write down the background story I have for the character, due to it deleting any carriage-returns.

Argh.

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Posted

Dear Devs:

Please fix this please

-Sincerely,
El Diablo Boy

 

Posted

Yeah.. this is a really annoying bug. I would also like our text limit to be doubled, along with giving us a character count (like 500/2000), as well as HTML formatting ability.


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Posted

html formatting would be wonderful

 

Posted

[ QUOTE ]
html formatting would be wonderful

[/ QUOTE ]

I think this bug is actually due to a move to disable html formatting in certain places.

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Posted

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
html formatting would be wonderful

[/ QUOTE ]
I think this bug is actually due to a move to disable html formatting in certain places.

[/ QUOTE ]

That's all the bug is - HTML is disabled in the bio text field, so line breaks still exist, are recorded and saved... Then purged from the text field and it's saved without them. Why, I don't know, but it happened at some point in I14 Open Beta, as I had custom critters with line breaks in their descriptions.

This is starting to remind me of the bad old days of 2004 when your cursor would jump when you deleted or backspaced over a letter and you could never be sure if what you saved would be the same next time you loaded it. Between 2004 and some point in 2006, my namesake character has lost his line breaks over two dozen times - pretty much 9 out of 10 times I thought to look, and because I ended up hitting within 2 symbols of the text limit, kept losing a good 10 symbols or so off the back of his last sentence. I hadn't seen data loss or corruption for years, but I guess nothing is immune to being broken and then never fixed for ages.

Come on, guys! Custom critters I can see, but at least let us use HTML in OUR bios!

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