I don't think you can. I'll try later on with a dummy arc to test since I have space available.
I don't think you can, either. I have a major rewrite that I'm working on for one of mine and I will have a lot of stuff to change, and even more to add. If I get it almost done and my connection decides to go down I will cry.... a lot. 
No AV/EBs Deal with The Devil's Pawn-207266 Slash DeMento and the Stolen Weapons-100045 Meet the Demon Spawn-151099 Feedback
Change it ONE PIECE AT A TIME. Then republish. Then wait for it to actually republish.
Mapserving right when you're almost done your totally awesome rewrite SUCKS. Massive souvenir rewrite, mapserved, twice. I didn't touch it for a week after that, even though I agreed with the people who had said the souvenir should be expanded upon.
That is why I ask if I can work on it locally.
Eva Destruction AR/Fire/Munitions Blaster
Darkfire Avenger DM/SD/Body Scrapper
Arc ID#161629 Freaks, Geeks, and Men in Black
Arc ID#431270 Until the End of the World
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That is why I ask if I can work on it locally.
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Just tested and it's a "No" unless I missed an option. At best, you could copy/paste long test fields. Thus, we officially need some form of "Upload Changes" button amongst the "Republish and Play" button sets.
Yeah, I might have to do it in steps. I did have that lovely little mapserver issue happen during one of my first major rewrites of one of mine, and I lost it all. Since I didn't have the sense to save the text to notepad or anything as I was working, I almost cried. I was so mad that I didn't touch mine for a while after that one, either. I was tempted to just give up because, at that time, only 1 or 2 people had even played it, and they were friends. I was debating why I even wanted to bother when there were so many thousands of arcs out there. But, I'm a stubborn Taurus and decided not to give up that easily. 
No AV/EBs Deal with The Devil's Pawn-207266 Slash DeMento and the Stolen Weapons-100045 Meet the Demon Spawn-151099 Feedback
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That is why I ask if I can work on it locally.
[/ QUOTE ]
Just tested and it's a "No" unless I missed an option. At best, you could copy/paste long test fields. Thus, we officially need some form of "Upload Changes" button amongst the "Republish and Play" button sets.
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I really like that idea. It would be so much easier to make a copy of the published arc to work on, offline. Then, just update the published version from there. Then we could test it before doing the upgrade on the live server, too.
No AV/EBs Deal with The Devil's Pawn-207266 Slash DeMento and the Stolen Weapons-100045 Meet the Demon Spawn-151099 Feedback
Where is this 'republish' button located? Cause when I went to publish from an edit it published a duplicate mission.
That's what I was trying to figure out. Apparently there isn't one. You have to edit the published mission.
Eva Destruction AR/Fire/Munitions Blaster
Darkfire Avenger DM/SD/Body Scrapper
Arc ID#161629 Freaks, Geeks, and Men in Black
Arc ID#431270 Until the End of the World
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Where is this 'republish' button located? Cause when I went to publish from an edit it published a duplicate mission.
[/ QUOTE ]
In the tab for your arc, click on the sub-tab for your Published miissions. From there click the arc's name (not the Play button), and it should expand to show the full arc description plus two new buttons for Unpublish and Edit. When you Edit, your normal Save As/Save & Test/etc buttons are replaced with Republish, Save Locally, and a few other options. We have the ability to save locally but we have no easy option for uploading/recalling those local changes.
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That is why I ask if I can work on it locally.
[/ QUOTE ]
Just tested and it's a "No" unless I missed an option. At best, you could copy/paste long test fields. Thus, we officially need some form of "Upload Changes" button amongst the "Republish and Play" button sets.
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If only Copy and Paste actually worked. Half the time when I paste something it scatters the pasted text among the text already there, or it blows away most of the text in the edit field, or (if there's a large amount of text to paste) it does nothing. Add to that the difficulty you have positioning the cursor at the end of the text or the end of a line, the weird infinite loop you sometimes get when the MA window opens and you have a large segment of text in the description, the unreliability of selecting a passage and then setting its color with the right-click context menu, I would say this is one of most frustrating editors I have used in over 30 years of computer use. I also wish CTRL+C and CTRL+V woudn't fire the powers I have bound to C and V (and, yeah, I've mapped those keys to nop in my bind file, but I shouldn't have to do that).
Just as there's an option to save the text of a published mission into a local file, there should be a way to read a local file into the MA editor for a published mission. They are completely reciprocal actions.
The critter files appear to be always local, no matter whether you're editing a published or local story. This makes it really hard to grok where everything is, what happens when you republish, what's changing, what's the same, etc.
The only thing that's stopping us from republishing a mission from a local text file is that you don't know the arc number. Editing from the server guarantees you have a valid arc number that you can update. Reading a local file into the MA editor while editing a published mission can't do anything you would do manually, so it seems there's no technical reason not to do it.
Well, yesterday I decided to go ahead and edit my CoT single mission arc. I expanded the story extensively by adding several more objectives with many additional clues, a plot twist that added a minor boss, a major overhaul of the text, etc.. It took me at least 4-5 hours of hard work and I was still not quite finished. Just as I was about to add the last couple of objectives.... yup, you guessed it, 'Disconnected from mapserver'. 
In retrospect, I wish that (frequently) along the way I had saved it to local, 'just in case', but I didn't. 
After that happened, I was very tempted to forget about the whole thing. Then, I calmed down and decided to do it all over again, but this time, I saved the arc on my local drive to make the changes. (I really am that stubborn) It took me until after 1 AM, then I tested it. (of course, since I did it locally, no mapserver snafus occurred)
I do like the changes because it really does improve the story, IMHO. Now, I am debating whether or not to delete the older version (only 6 plays/4 stars) and put this one up instead. I might do some final editing and a few run-throughs to make sure it all works correctly, then just go for it.
If they made it possible to upload changes from the local drive, I'd be golden and not have to worry about starting it all over again at 0 stars. Most of those plays were not friends of mine so, apparently, the people that did try it liked the original. I just hope the remake is going to be worth starting all over from scratch.
No AV/EBs Deal with The Devil's Pawn-207266 Slash DeMento and the Stolen Weapons-100045 Meet the Demon Spawn-151099 Feedback
[ QUOTE ]
Well, yesterday I decided to go ahead and edit my CoT single mission arc. I expanded the story extensively by adding several more objectives with many additional clues, a plot twist that added a minor boss, a major overhaul of the text, etc.. It took me at least 4-5 hours of hard work and I was still not quite finished. Just as I was about to add the last couple of objectives.... yup, you guessed it, 'Disconnected from mapserver'.
In retrospect, I wish that (frequently) along the way I had saved it to local, 'just in case', but I didn't.
After that happened, I was very tempted to forget about the whole thing. Then, I calmed down and decided to do it all over again, but this time, I saved the arc on my local drive to make the changes. (I really am that stubborn) It took me until after 1 AM, then I tested it. (of course, since I did it locally, no mapserver snafus occurred)
I do like the changes because it really does improve the story, IMHO. Now, I am debating whether or not to delete the older version (only 6 plays/4 stars) and put this one up instead. I might do some final editing and a few run-throughs to make sure it all works correctly, then just go for it.
If they made it possible to upload changes from the local drive, I'd be golden and not have to worry about starting it all over again at 0 stars. Most of those plays were not friends of mine so, apparently, the people that did try it liked the original. I just hope the remake is going to be worth starting all over from scratch.
[/ QUOTE ]
if i'm not mistaken, after saving to local file, the "Republish" option is not longer available
[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
Well, yesterday I decided to go ahead and edit my CoT single mission arc. I expanded the story extensively by adding several more objectives with many additional clues, a plot twist that added a minor boss, a major overhaul of the text, etc.. It took me at least 4-5 hours of hard work and I was still not quite finished. Just as I was about to add the last couple of objectives.... yup, you guessed it, 'Disconnected from mapserver'.
In retrospect, I wish that (frequently) along the way I had saved it to local, 'just in case', but I didn't.
After that happened, I was very tempted to forget about the whole thing. Then, I calmed down and decided to do it all over again, but this time, I saved the arc on my local drive to make the changes. (I really am that stubborn) It took me until after 1 AM, then I tested it. (of course, since I did it locally, no mapserver snafus occurred)
I do like the changes because it really does improve the story, IMHO. Now, I am debating whether or not to delete the older version (only 6 plays/4 stars) and put this one up instead. I might do some final editing and a few run-throughs to make sure it all works correctly, then just go for it.
If they made it possible to upload changes from the local drive, I'd be golden and not have to worry about starting it all over again at 0 stars. Most of those plays were not friends of mine so, apparently, the people that did try it liked the original. I just hope the remake is going to be worth starting all over from scratch.
[/ QUOTE ]
if i'm not mistaken, after saving to local file, the "Republish" option is not longer available
[/ QUOTE ]
Not in the version that you saved to local (because it recreates it as a new file on your PC), but you can still republish the published version, IIRC. I do recall having that problem at one point and had to unpublish before republishing. One of my arcs should have a lot more 'ratings' because of that. In fact, I think it's the one I was working on. It might have been one of the things that was fixed already. 
No AV/EBs Deal with The Devil's Pawn-207266 Slash DeMento and the Stolen Weapons-100045 Meet the Demon Spawn-151099 Feedback
Yes, saving to a local file stops work on the Published arc. You have to exit the local file, go to the published arc and hit the Edit button again to resume working on the published version.
You have the option to republish or save locally. Not both. If you want to do both, you have to republish first, wait for the "blah blah blah has been updated" message, refresh your MA search window, and go edit the newly republished arc and save to local.
If there's an easier way, please tell me.
Eva Destruction AR/Fire/Munitions Blaster
Darkfire Avenger DM/SD/Body Scrapper
Arc ID#161629 Freaks, Geeks, and Men in Black
Arc ID#431270 Until the End of the World
Can I do the edits to the locally saved copy of the arc, then overwrite the published version without losing the arc ID and ratings? If so, how do I do it? Or do I have to work on the published version?
I'm considering a fairly heavy edit of one of my arcs, basically merging the first two missions into one. It would be MUCH easier to do in a local file.
Eva Destruction AR/Fire/Munitions Blaster
Darkfire Avenger DM/SD/Body Scrapper
Arc ID#161629 Freaks, Geeks, and Men in Black
Arc ID#431270 Until the End of the World