Massive edit on 'live' or replace with local redo?
By
Alari_Azure,
Posted on: 2009-06-01 23:13 in Mission Architect
Only 6 ratings? And you're wondering if you should republish or re-edit. I've re-entered complete missions from scratch (see 2711 Exploring the Architect, I made each new mission separately, then I re-created the mission from scratch in the edit window to retain my arc ID#) But that was also to keep the four digit ID number. If you only have 6 ratings, and you don't care about your ID number, just republish and save yourself a headache.
I've done massive edits live before, usually I do them in increments. The only BIG one was when I added a whole extra mission to Amulet of J'gara and that was after I tested the mission so that I knew what to do in the live copy. Didn't take long to splice it in.
You can make a bunch of incremental edits with nobody noticing. The odds that someone may start the arc in the middle of your edits is rather slim.
Course in my case I had 50 ratings, so I was very adamant about not unpublishing.
Another thing to keep in mind when editing: Autosave doesn't really help, saving doesn't really help. If you want to save an unfinished copy of your re-edit, you have to at least get it to a publishable state and republish as a de-facto "autosave". The only thing you have to worry about is people playing in the middle of an edit, though you could also change the description to mention that it's in the process of being edited, then you just have to remember to remove that when done.
It might help that in issue 15 you can flag your mission as "Work in Progress" (default), "Looking for Feedback", and "Final".
Though to be honest, I never consider any arc to truly be final. Unless it's locked like a Dev Choice there is always possibility for change.
Sorry to hear about the mapserver problem, I've hit something like that too.
Not long ago I was doing some massive updating on my second arc and was told that I couldn't update due to an error - and lost all that work and time (devs, fix that! work should not be discarded like that!). These days I update like every ten minutes of work put in - or less, say after each "big change" like "all the detail dialogue" in mish #2 or something.
I don't try and update the arc then republish it because I'd hate to lose the stars. I have no CoH friends or active SGs so I'm having to really hustle for the few plays I get; I think my first and "Most-Pimped" arc was at 32 last I checked?
YMMV of course.
One other thing to keep in mind. When you are editing characters in a published arc any other person playing your arc and trying to load a mission with those custom characters will crash to the desktop. So, I try to do my edits during off hours.
WN
Check out one of my most recent arcs:
457506 - A Very Special Episode - An abandoned TV, a missing kid's TV show host and more
416951 - The Ms. Manners Task Force - More wacky villains, Wannabes. things in poor taste
or one of my other arcs including two 2010 Player's Choice Winners and an2009 Official AE Awards Nominee for Best Original Story
One other thing to keep in mind. When you are editing characters in a published arc any other person playing your arc and trying to load a mission with those custom characters will crash to the desktop.
Uh, what? Anything you do isn't supposed to have any effect on people already playing your mission -- everything should be loaded for them already.
Current Blog Post: "Why I am an Atheist..."
"And I say now these kittens, they do not get trained/As we did in the days when Victoria reigned!" -- T. S. Eliot, "Gus, the Theatre Cat"
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One other thing to keep in mind. When you are editing characters in a published arc any other person playing your arc and trying to load a mission with those custom characters will crash to the desktop.
Uh, what? Anything you do isn't supposed to have any effect on people already playing your mission -- everything should be loaded for them already.
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It's probably a case of 'they load mission A, you start to edit custom mobs that appear in A and B, and when they start to load mission B the system poops'.
Just a theory
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One other thing to keep in mind. When you are editing characters in a published arc any other person playing your arc and trying to load a mission with those custom characters will crash to the desktop.
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Uh, what? Anything you do isn't supposed to have any effect on people already playing your mission -- everything should be loaded for them already.
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See above bold. Let me try to be more clear. It is true if someone starts a mission and then you start working on your customs it will have no effect. However, if they go to start the next mission in the arc and you have a character that is featured in that mission open it has not appeared in a previous mission in the arc, they will crash to the desktop.
WN
P.S. - I already bugged this several weeks ago.
Check out one of my most recent arcs:
457506 - A Very Special Episode - An abandoned TV, a missing kid's TV show host and more
416951 - The Ms. Manners Task Force - More wacky villains, Wannabes. things in poor taste
or one of my other arcs including two 2010 Player's Choice Winners and an2009 Official AE Awards Nominee for Best Original Story
I appreciate all of the great responses. My reason for not wanting to republish is also because I don't have a lot of people in game to play my arcs. Most of my SGs (2 out of 3) only have one or 2 semi-active players besides me. Since I have always had mapserver issues, especially in team missions, I usually play solo (it keeps my BP/frustration level in check and doesn't tick off all my teammates). Unfortunately, that means that I don't have a lot of friends in game that I can have replay/rate my arcs. My missions haven't had a lot of plays and most of them have been from people choosing them at random. It's taken a long time just to get those few people to try them. The number of plays has been increasing, slowly, as I have been posting here on the boards, but I have yet to break 10 plays on any of them.
(Note: I have already accidentally unpublished one of my arcs after an edit, and wiped out the 4 or 5 ratings of 4-5* it already had. I hated having to start it from scratch.)
I might have to do it as someone suggested, in increments, and make a note in the description that it's 'in process of being edited'. I also wish there was an easy way to copy all of the content from the remake and put it in notepad for easier transfer of the text, and, so I'm sure not to forget anything important. I'm pretty sure I can't have both missions open at the same time, so all the copy/pasting will have to be in 2 steps. First to transfer the remake to notepad, then to transfer all of it into the published arc. Maybe I am better off unpublishing/replacing, because this will take a very long time to do. It's only one mission, but the amount of new info is huge compared to the original. 
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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One other thing to keep in mind. When you are editing characters in a published arc any other person playing your arc and trying to load a mission with those custom characters will crash to the desktop.
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Uh, what? Anything you do isn't supposed to have any effect on people already playing your mission -- everything should be loaded for them already.
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See above bold. Let me try to be more clear. It is true if someone starts a mission and then you start working on your customs it will have no effect. However, if they go to start the next mission in the arc and you have a character that is featured in that mission open it has not appeared in a previous mission in the arc, they will crash to the desktop.
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I have never seen that once and I've edited my live arcs between missions when I saw something really wrong that I wanted to fix so the next person wouldn't deal with it, and that includes tweaking customs. The changes still don't show up unless you restart the arc.
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It might help that in issue 15 you can flag your mission as "Work in Progress" (default), "Looking for Feedback", and "Final".
Though to be honest, I never consider any arc to truly be final. Unless it's locked like a Dev Choice there is always possibility for change.
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Ooh, I hadn't heard about that. That sounds great.
As far as the last two terms - I can see calling something "Looking for Feedback" if you've got a good chance of doing significant rewrites based on said feedback. If all you plan on doing is tweaking I think it's fine to call something "Final" even if it isn't, quite.
And for a while things were cold,
They were scared down in their holes
The forest that once was green
Was colored black by those killing machines
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I have never seen that once and I've edited my live arcs between missions when I saw something really wrong that I wanted to fix so the next person wouldn't deal with it, and that includes tweaking customs. The changes still don't show up unless you restart the arc.
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This happens when someone other than you tries to load a custom character you are editing. Basically it is all about bad timing. It has happened to me and I got an irate tell saying my arc crashed the person's computer.
WN
Check out one of my most recent arcs:
457506 - A Very Special Episode - An abandoned TV, a missing kid's TV show host and more
416951 - The Ms. Manners Task Force - More wacky villains, Wannabes. things in poor taste
or one of my other arcs including two 2010 Player's Choice Winners and an2009 Official AE Awards Nominee for Best Original Story
I've decided that trying to transfer all of the info from the replacement to live would be way too much work to try to do, for the few ratings that it has at this point. I have had too many mapserver problems in the past few days, so chances are that I could end up having to do some of it more than once, even if I did it in stages. I'm going into the game now to make the change. I will come back to update my sigline and my thread to put in the new arc ID#.
Thank you, all, for the feedback. It is very much appreciated. 
No AV/EBs Deal with The Devil's Pawn-207266 Slash DeMento and the Stolen Weapons-100045 Meet the Demon Spawn-151099 Feedback
Well, the deed is done. I published the new version and updated my thread and sigline to reflect the new ID# 207266. If anyone is willing to test it out, I would greatly appreciate any feedback on the story and on the added custom characters.
Thanks again to everyone for the advice given. I really appreciate it.
UPDATE!
Arc Name: Deal with The Devil's Pawn [/color]
NEW Arc ID: 207266
Faction: Heroic
Creator Global Name: @Alari Azure
Difficulty Level: 5-54
Synopsis: Single Mission/Circle of Thorns/Large Office Map/Ambush/Custom Boss/Collection/Patrol
You must defeat The Devil's Pawn and recover Lucifer's Scroll and other items stolen from the Museum of Antiquities. The Circle of Thorns must never be allowed to unlock the secret spell that has been written on that scroll. If they ever do, it could be the worst thing that could ever happen to the people of Paragon City. They must be stopped before it's too late!
No AV/EBs Deal with The Devil's Pawn-207266 Slash DeMento and the Stolen Weapons-100045 Meet the Demon Spawn-151099 Feedback
I'd appreciate some feedback/opinions on whether I should unpublish my original version of 'Deal with the Devil's Pawn' and replace it with the 'new and improved' (hopefully) more action-packed version. The published one is a CoT, short/single mission that doesn't have a lot of content (one collectible/fight boss). The new version is still only a single mission, but with a lot more background story, clues, collectibles and an added plot twist, including the addition of another minor character (both, the new character and the boss, I created as customs, so the story won't be altered by a 'random' CoT 'standard' that might not fit the character I needed for it).
So, my dilemma is whether it's worth it to attempt to copy/paste all of the new info into the live arc in an attempt to retain it's 4* rating (only 6 ratings so far). I recently tried to make the massive changes to the live arc 'on the fly', making it up as I went along. After spending 4-5 hours on the rewrite (which was still not finished), I had a mapserver disconnect that almost made me want to delete every mission I had ever written/published, unpublish all my live arcs, and never go back to the MA again. (Can you tell that I was a tad annoyed?)
But, I remade the mission as a local file by doing a 'save as' from the published version and going from there. Some of the text I had written before the crash, I had saved in notepad (so I could tweak it there easier than dealing with the text snafus that plague MA), but most of it I had to write all over again. I hate the thought of having to spend a massive amount of time trying to copy/paste and add all of the extra objectives into the published arc, again. If I got another DC in the middle of it, I would probably want to throw my PC into the pond in the back yard, through the closed sliding glass door.
Should I opt to save my sanity and just replace it from local, or do I dare to tempt fate?
No AV/EBs Deal with The Devil's Pawn-207266 Slash DeMento and the Stolen Weapons-100045 Meet the Demon Spawn-151099 Feedback