Character description box question

I usually don't put bios on my characters, but decided to place some general information about my toon in this box under the I.D. section.

However, the cursor in the box doesn't want to cooperate. It jumps all over when I try to move it, and sometimes dissappears altogether. I've tried logging to correct this and it doesn't seem to help.

Is there a trick to this I don't know about? I feel silly even asking about it, but can't seem to pinpoint why the cursor behaves in this way.

It's mostly because the bio box sucks. Best way to do it is to write it out in Notepad or something, then copy-paste into the box. You'll have to insert line breaks since I don't think those carry over (or didn't the last time I copied over a bio).

Quote:

Originally Posted by Dispari I don't know why Dink thinks she's not as sexy as Jay was. In 5 posts she's already upstaged his entire career.

Ok, thanks for the tip. I'll give that a go Agge.

Yeah I've been writing out my bios "off-line" for years and cut-n-pasting them into the game. Just so much easier than fighting the awful in-game cursor weirdness.

But one thing to note is if your bio is close to max allowed size (1,024 characters) you could see some strangeness as far as just how big the game thinks your bio is. It seems that when you cut-n-paste text into the game it wants to add a "random" number of hidden control characters which can potentially chop the end of your bio off.

Basically the solution seems to be to keep redoing it until the number of characters it thinks is there is below the 1,024 limit. I've seen a bio that has say 1,000 characters get pasted into the game and have the game think there was anywhere between 1,010 and 1,050 characters. Whenever it "thought" there was more than 1,024 characters it got chopped. I had to keep repasting it until the total was under 1,024.

I just take this weirdness as yet another dumb "feature" of a very bad text interface.

Actually the limit is 1023 characters. I did quite a bit of experimenting with it a while back, because I was making a character counter for the edit box on my SG's website to make it easier to write our bios there (with a better editor) and copy/paste them, and wanted to make it as accurate as possible.

The "phantom" characters are usually unicode (technically UTF-8) characters, which take up more than one byte. Things like letters with accents over them, the curly quote marks that programs like MS Word like to insert, etc. Using something simple like notepad helps avoid them, but you can still end up with them if you're not careful.

The other thing that makes it difficult is that the character counter on the in-game edit box is often simply wrong. I haven't figured out exactly what confuses it, but it will tell you that you have less or more characters than you actually do, and sometimes even lets you keep typing when the count exceeds 1024. Editing an existing bio is almost guaranteed to show it incorrectly. Deleting line breaks within the editor also really screws it up.

In all cases the maximum length the game seems to store server-side is 1023, so I'm guessing it's a 1024 character buffer (including the terminating null). If you type more than that when the counter is confused it will truncate your text upon saving. Really I've given up on the in-game editor and always do a count externally, then copy/paste into a BLANK bio, saving it first as empty if necessary.

Unfortunately even that is a bit of a pain because it won't paste line breaks

One thing that I have often noticed causing "phantom characters" is double spacing after a period. I always do that because I think it's the proper way to type, but when my bio runs over the character limit and I start deleting the extra spaces, it seems like I pick up 3-5 characters for every space I delete.