Add an Auto-Save Option to the Character Description, please! Or, "Not Again!!!"

[Echo Night]

I wanted to move my story that I was writing, from the description box to Notepad to finish it, and I accidentally pressed control+v instead of control+c, and deleted a very cool story for my character :( Sadly, this isn't the first time.

 

I know, I know. Why didn't I start writing in Notepad first if this has happened before? Momentum. Sometimes when I'm in game, a story idea will appear, and I get to writing. The creativity just flows, and I don't want to stop it (or can't stop it) until there is a natural pause.

 

In this case, the deletion is fitting, considering I am writing a story based on Tetsuya Fujita, the creator of the (F)ujjita Scale. If you had been anywhere near me when control+v had been hit, you'd have thought a mythical EF6 tornado had just occurred due to my "I'm an idiot" gasp. Seriously, I almost ate my TV. The gasp was that powerful.

 

Please?

[UltraAlt]

I'm pretty sure if this could have been done (or even adding an undo button), it would have happened a long time ago.

[Rudra]

Considering the amount of 'errors' the bio window text editor induces when using special characters like quotation marks and line returns, I don't think an auto-save function would help you near as much as you think it would. Even moving back and forth between Word and the bio screen, I find the text file just goes bad in the game. So I get why you want that function, but I more recommend just writing up your bios in Notepad, Word, or absolutely any other text editor than the game's, and importing what you came up with to the game.

[srmalloy]

And it gets even uglier should you choose to venture outside of the basic ASCII character set -- City of Heroes understands Unicode (a necessity for localization for Korea, where the Hangul alphabet is entirely in a Unicode page), but the copy-and-paste functions don't work right. I don't know if it's a conflict between recognizing Unicode's UTF-8, UTF-16, and UTF-32 encoding when pasting, but copying uses, say, UTF-16 while programs like Notepad expect UTF-8, so what gets pasted into another editor looks like line noise (oh, and doesn't that date me for knowing what line noise across an audio coupler was like on your screen). The other consideration is that Unicode -- at least the code pages CoH supports -- are two-byte characters, so each character in, say, "Институт эволюционной физиологии и биохимии имени И.М. Сеченова" ('I. M. Sechenov Institute for Evolutionary Physiology and Biochemistry', which I reference in a number of my characters' backgrounds) takes up two characters out of the 1023 allowed in the background text. Sometimes, getting a bio incorporating Unicode involves quite a bit of back-and-forth editing to get the text to fit in the allowed space, so I always, as Rudra describes, write the background up in a text editor, paste it into the game, then go back and edit the text in the editor if/when it doesn't fit, for as many times as necessary.