Category Archives: Meta

HeroMachine 2 is back!

Thanks to a program called Ruffle, Flash content can now be shown in browsers again! Head on over to the HeroMachine 2 page and start creating your own character portraits like you did back in the day!

Make Your Own HM2 Character!

How to Use HeroMachine Locally

Hi all, with big thanks to HeroMachiner Eric Bowling, here's how you can use HeroMachine outside of your browser. Adobe has said they're going to be force uninstalling the Flash Player (the standalone player basically) but I don't know that applies to this particular version.

Basically you download a local Flash Player application, then put in the URL for a .swf file (a compiled Flash object, which is what HeroMachine uses) and it plays. I've tried it on my Mac with HM3 and HM2 and it seems to work like a champ. You'll still need an Internet connection but if this goes well I may bundle up the files and make them available online so you could truly run it all locally. We'll just have to see, I don't want to sell people something and then BAM Adobe force uninstalls the Flash Players and it no longer works.

Anyway, the article explaining how to get the Standalone Flash Player Debugger is at https://www.howtogeek.com/438141/how-to-play-adobe-flash-swf-files-outside-your-web-browser/ – install the one relevant to your Operating System.

Once the Flash Player Debugger is installed per the instructions in that article, launch the Flash Player Debugger and go to "File -> Open Location". This is where you type in the URL to a .swf file. Do not download the .swf file to run from your hard drive, that will not work, you must use "Open Location" and put in one of the URLs below! Here are the ones for HeroMachine so you can just copy and paste:

For fun, here are the URLs for some of the hardly-ever-used versions:

CAVEATS: The "Export as an image" function in HM3 will NOT work. Saving as a text file will. 

I think that's pretty much it. Let me know if you run into issues with this, though honestly, there's not a lot I can do since I can't edit the source files any more and I can't control what Adobe does with their players.

Flash End of Life and maybe HeroMachine as well

Update: Check this post for instructions on how to keep using HeroMachine in a local Flash Player Debugger.

Flash has reached its End of Life and HeroMachine no longer works. Thank you for your support over the years and for your interest.

I have paid thousands of dollars and worked for 2+ years for a replacement but alas, it is not yet done. I've investigated replacements for Flash that would allow it to remain operational, but they haven't worked out.

We'll continue to work behind the scenes to see if we can complete the work that's been done so far but clearly, my promises are worth very little right now. I'm devastated and so sorry that we weren't able to bring this thing in for a landing in time.

I'm proud that for 20+ years, this site has enabled people to bring their inner creativity to life. I feel like I've lost a bit of my soul today and I am so, so sorry to have let you all down.

Check back occasionally and / or join the Facebook group (https://www.facebook.com/HeroMachine/) for any future updates.

All the best, and please keep on creating.

Jeff

A really cool game

Hey y'all, HeroMachine user Daysean Driscoll reached out to show me this awesome game he's put together. "Hero's Mantle". It uses HeroMachine-based art! I haven't had a chance to play it myself but it looks fantastic. Check it out and see what you think on the game's Facebook page!

Heroe's Mantle characters standing

Introducing the Nerdmudgeon podcast!

Nerdmudgeon, Earth's mightiest podcast!

Hi all! I hope you'll forgive my interruption of your super-hero-making for a moment, but I wanted to share a project my two best friends and I have been working on during These Trying Times. We've put together a podcast called "Nerdmudgeon", where the three of us discuss various geeky subjects from our perspective as three middle-aged nerds who get grumpy when they move too fast.

We're reviewing all of the Marvel Cinematic Universe films in chronological order to see if our opinions about them have changed over the years since we first saw them.

Each episode is just a half hour or less in length and we try to come at them with a positive, genial discussion with hopefully a few laughs thrown in as we poke fun at each other.

If you get a chance, I'd sure appreciate you giving it a try and letting me know what you think. If you like it, please leave us a review on the podcast-listening program of your choice and maybe recommend it to other geek friends?

Thanks in advance for your support and I hope you're having a great one!

Art Thief Found

Just to let you guys all know, it has brought it to our attention that a WordPress Blog by the name of Sunburst Comics and it's owner Andrew Burke has been stealing a lot of peoples Heromachine characters for his character profile images.

I would advise going to the blog, looking through as much as you can and flagging everything that is yours if you don't want it used. I've so far found three of my works in only one section and we've also found art by djuby, Trekkie, Funkmachine7, DiCicatriz & Madjack, so that should give you an idea of how bad this is. The guy has changed the names of all the characters (appart from the DC ones he's included) so it's not easy to find everything.

If you find something of yours and want to take it down there is a little ... symbol that appears in the bottom right of the screen that brings up a pop up menu of actions, the report this content option is in there. Make sure you have links to both the offending page on Sunburst and your original posting. So far, it seems he's only using characters posted on Deviantart, so if you're on Deviantart DEFINATELY CHECK IT. If you're not, it may be worth checking just in case, because we don't know if he's going to other sites as well.

Credit to Blastermasterism for discovering this, his original journal can be found here

Flash Support is Ending but HeroMachine Is NOT!

Hi folks! It's been a while since I posted anything, but since hardly a day goes by without someone asking me what the future of HeroMachine is given that support for Flash (the software HeroMachine is built with) will be ending in 2020, I thought I should give you an update.

This year I have been working with Ben, the developer who helped with the site migration a number of years ago, on a non-Flash version of HeroMachine 3 built with Javascript and PHP instead of Flash. Once complete, this version should work on all devices and browsers without needing Flash at all, including (in theory) iOS so you can Machine on the go.

We have a ways to go yet, but Lord willing and the creek don't rise, I hope to have something to show you all next month.

As for what will happen with older HeroMachine versions, I honestly don't have an answer yet. I don't plan on making a non-Flash version of those, though my hope is that someone will have a "non official" Flash player plugin available at some point that you can use in a browser so they'll just keep working. We'll see.

Thanks for sticking with me and best of luck in all your creative endeavors!

3D Items For Cosplay

The reason I started HeroMachine so many years ago was because I knew most people were bursting with creativity, but they just lacked the physical skill of actually drawing what their imaginations were inventing. A quick browse through the forums shows I was right -- you all do amazing work and I am continuously staggered by your work.

I recently found a guy online who brings that same philosophy to cosplaying. Nikko Industries provides downloadable files you can 3D-print to make creating awesome cosplays much faster and more accessible to those who -- like me! -- have vivid imaginations but lack the physical crafting skills to bring what I imagine to life.

I had a lot of fun taking a crack at trying to replicate one of his 3D items in HeroMachine 3:

Helmet in HM3 next to an actual 3D printed helmet

I think I got pretty close!

If you've ever wanted to get into cosplay but were intimidated by all the crafting involved, and you have a 3D printer, check out his stuff! He's a really cool guy and his files are fantastic.

HeroMachine 2 Download Problems

I've had some reports of folks who have downloaded HeroMachine 2 not getting the full list of component sets beyond Standard.

I just spent the last hour or so trying out various things and I was able to replicate the issue on my Mac. It looks like the core problem is that browsers now have to be explicitly told that it's ok to trust Flash content that loads from your local hard drive. Otherwise it won't allow the browser to read the components.txt file that has the list of all the other, non-Standard components in it.

It's a bit of a hassle to fix, but I was able to get it working. Here's how.

First, I wasn't able to get Chrome to work properly, which is a bummer because that's my main browser of choice. However, I was ultimately able to get both Firefox and Safari to load all the sets normally.

For both Safari and Firefox, the first step is to get your browser to trust the local folder where you've stored heromachine.html and heromachine.swf. Directions for doing that are at this link https://forums.adobe.com/thread/2210842 but I'll paste them here for convenience:

For Internet Explorer, Edge, Firefox, Opera and Safari:

On the affected system, go to the Flash Player Settings Manager:

  • Mac: System Preferences > Flash Player
  •  Windows: Control Panel > Flash Player
  • Select the Advanced tab
  • In the Developer Tools section, click the Trusted Location Settings button
  • Click the "Add..." button and add relevant files and folders to the list

You can either manually navigate to the folder and control-click the htm, swf, and txt files, or you can copy the URL your local HeroMachine is in from your browser window. Like in my case, it was file:///Users/jhebert/Downloads/hmach25/. Paste that into the text box that appears when you click the "Add..." button in the instructions above.

Once that's done, in theory you should be able to close and reopen your browser and the list should be complete. In my case, I wasn't able to see any Flash content because I hadn't yet installed the Flash Player plugin for either Safari or Firefox, but once I went to https://get.adobe.com/flashplayer/ and installed it, I was up and working in Safari.

Firefox, however, threw one more hurdle at me. By default it now requires all Flash content to load from a site that starts with http: or https:, which means that local content (which loads from file://) won't work. To fix that, I found this article -- https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1172126 -- which said to do this:

There is a new security setting in Firefox 55 that supersedes everything else. Only SWF files retrieved on http:// or https:// addresses are played (not file://, ftp://, etc.). If you want to revert to the previous behavior:

(1) In a new tab, type or paste about:config in the address bar and press Enter/Return. Click the button promising to be careful.

(2) In the search box above the list, type or paste plug*ht and pause while the list is filtered

(3) Double-click the plugins.http_https_only preference to switch the value from true to false 

Once I did that it all worked like it is supposed to.

I know this is all a big hassle and I wish there were some other way around it. But browsers have been getting more and more aggressive with how they handle Flash content, so there are ever more hoops to jump through. Hopefully this helps someone down the line, though.

Basketball Mascots as Super-Heroes

Hi all, Jeff here! It's been a while since I posted anything, and yet here I come with a sports post of all things. Without further ado, here goes!

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