roleplay Suggestion: Make the Personal ID window bigger and easier to use!

[Zephyr Star]

(Sorry just saw this come up in the BIG RP thread, don't mind me) One of the things that has given me frustration all the way back to Live was the personal ID window. It's hard to type in the window, especially if you need to go back and correct a typo or grammar. You will often have to deal with spacing bugging out and need to start completely over. Copy/pasting is a pain since it often doesn't recognize spacing correctly.

 

Also, 1023 characters is hardly enough room, especially since it uses sentence structure (spacing and paragraphs) as characters! I'm not thinking of room to write a novella but sometimes a character has a fun background and it's frustrating to run out of room and either have to restructure the spacing or cut off the last sentence. I understand wanting to just glance at a background to get an idea of a character, but having more room would help for a TL;DR at the top or something similar so people wouldn't feel like they have to read everything else. I sometimes enjoy sitting in Pocket D, just reading character backgrounds when I'm taking a break from other things in the game.

Just a thought I've often had! Sorry if this has been brought up before, I tried searching but I didn't find anything right away.

 

 

Edited March 14, 2022 by Zephyr Star

[Rudra]

Don't know why you are /jranger'ing this. It doesn't change anything in game, it just gives more room for text in the character bio. And as someone who has written shortened bios, at less than 1,000 characters including spaces and punctuation to be safe in Word, and then copied/pasted it over to CoX only to find out I'm some number of characters past the 1,023 character limit because of how special characters like apostrophe are coded, this suggestion makes a LOT of sense to me.

 

Especially since just typing in the bio window, you can watch the character count jump all over the place by as much as 5 when you add or delete a single character as you rewrite the bio to make it fit somehow.

 

Edit: Change short to shortened.

Edited March 14, 2022 by Rudra

[TheZag]

I guess im just used to the ingame 'editor'.  I use the arrow keys to move the cursor around and click and drag to highlight text to get the box to scroll where i want.

[Greycat]

Honestly, before we get more *room* in the editor, just having the editor *fixed* would be nice. I hate typing, just to have it complet

 

Meanwhile, you start tryingly stop working and not want to budge no matter what you do. to type somewhere else and all of a sudden it drops whatever you were typing in before in.

 

It's annoying.

[Rudra]

10 minutes ago, Greycat said:

Honestly, before we get more *room* in the editor, just having the editor *fixed* would be nice. I hate typing, just to have it complet

 

Meanwhile, you start tryingly stop working and not want to budge no matter what you do. to type somewhere else and all of a sudden it drops whatever you were typing in before in.

 

It's annoying.

Fixed. Definitely. That would solve probably half the problems with trying to fit a bio in the given space.

[WanderingAries]

And this is why I (long ago) started pre-typing things into a document I keep and then pasting it into the game.

[Clave Dark 5]

On 3/14/2022 at 4:03 PM, WanderingAries said:

And this is why I (long ago) started pre-typing things into a document I keep and then pasting it into the game.

Similarly, I end up typing them into an online character counter and spell checker.

[Marbing]

On 3/14/2022 at 2:48 PM, Greycat said:

Honestly, before we get more *room* in the editor, just having the editor *fixed* would be nice. I hate typing, just to have it complet

 

Meanwhile, you start tryingly stop working and not want to budge no matter what you do. to type somewhere else and all of a sudden it drops whatever you were typing in before in.

 

It's annoying.

Very, very clever way to make a point...

...and I agree. I write bio's all the time and this is the primary pain point for me.

 

On 3/14/2022 at 3:03 PM, WanderingAries said:

And this is why I (long ago) started pre-typing things into a document I keep and then pasting it into the game.

I have started to type things into notepad then paste them into the game. It helps a lot.

 

On 3/14/2022 at 2:32 PM, Rudra said:

Especially since just typing in the bio window, you can watch the character count jump all over the place by as much as 5 when you add or delete a single character as you rewrite the bio to make it fit somehow.

There are ways around this sometimes if you play with the spaces a bit. Basically find where it is adding 5 characters for 1 character and backspace, then start typing WITHOUT adding in a space before you start. Then add the space back after you finished your sentence. 

Not saying this should be the case, just trying to help others out when I have found ways around the limitations or issues. It most certainly SHOULD be fixed. 

 

On 3/14/2022 at 11:56 AM, Zephyr Star said:

1023 characters is hardly enough room, especially since it uses sentence structure (spacing and paragraphs) as characters!

I agree, this needs to be a bit larger. At least 50% more. Though I do like the challenge of fitting an entire story into 1023 characters, haha.

[Rudra]

I use Word to write up my character bios, then copy from Word into CoX. After checking punctuation, spaces, and letters/numbers total less than 1,023 in Word, I routinely find that I am well past the 1,023 character limit in CoX. I started using Word back on Live because I was tired of the bio editor jumping around on my bio while I try to edit it and giving weird character counts. Spaces are especially egregious for character count in CoX when near the edges of the window. Usually, I have to have a bio of less than 800 spaces, punctuation, letters, and numbers in Word to have a bio of less than character limit in CoX. A roughly 200 character count difference is maddening.

 

So having some character count consistency, fixing the editor, would go a looooooooooooooong way to making people like me happy. If that can't be done because of coding? Then an expansion of character count limit would be greatly appreciated to compensate. I try hard to keep my bios short. It is frustrating that even after tweaking a bio repeatedly to get it under the character limit in Word, it is somehow still too long for CoX requiring me to copy and paste back and forth repeatedly until I get a bio that fits. (I just have to cut out a lot of what I feel are critical details. It feels like the game says a bio should only be name, maybe age, and place of birth. I know otherwise, I've written far more comprehensive bios than that in game, it just really feels like that sometimes.)