Monthly Archives: February 2009

I spent all day (literally) fulfilling Eric's request in the comments to my last HM3 update, and am happy to say that the basics of manual RBG and alpha color entry are in for HM3. The screen grab here doesn't have the Alpha channel implemented yet, but it's coming:

All of the 28 color boxes on this page are custom ones, filled by moi. I can put more boxes in there if you want, though even 28 seemed kind of like overkill. Anyway, from this panel you can mouse over the color gradient until you get the color you want and click, saving it to the custom color swatches (and also filling in the hex and RGB fields with that color's values in case you need a starting point).

You can also manually enter a hex value if you prefer that and save that color swatch.

Or, you can enter Red, Green, and Blue colors in the text boxes and save that color.

Meanwhile you can adjust the alpha (transparency) of any particular color area on the figure as well, so you can get those cool see-through skeleton skins and such. There'll be a text box like the RBG ones next to the Alpha slider for that purpose.

I love this -- you guys make a request, it sounds like a good idea that I can hypothetically figure out, and bam, it goes in the program. That's the kind of live, interactive development you can only get with the web.

So thank Eric if this sounds like something you'll get use out of! And if you won't, you can just ignore it -- you're under no obligation to use any of the new advanced color functions at all if you don't want.

And now, the weekend, woot!

I've spent the last two days trying to get the various tabs working in HeroMachine 3, and it's been more aggravating than I thought it would be. The structure is a little bit different, and chasing down all the changes in hundreds of lines of code can be quite taxing. But I think I have the basics working in terms of loading up sets of items. As a bonus, I can even color things! I only have one set of Zombie heads and one set of Zombie body parts active at the moment (I don't want to do too much until I know exactly how it needs to be set up to work) but here's a taste of things so far:

(Click to embiggen.)

As you can see, a lot of functionality has been condensed into the larger tab structure. The ability to choose your current slot type and the set of items for that slot will remain present at all times, so no matter what you're doing you can change your targeted item. In the minis, the Rotate and Scale functions were always present to the left of the ad, but for HM3 they're being moved to the new "Transform" tab. I'll probably also have a set of "Move" controls there too, so if (as someone mentioned earlier) you have trouble dragging the actual item where you want it to go, you can use arrows to move them remotely, as it were.

I tell you, what's really struck me this week as I've been bearing down and really grinding out the code is just how fricking complicated this thing is. After you code something and it's all working, you kind of forget about it completely. It just is. But then when you have to go back and tweak and expand it, you realize how the gradual accumulation of complexity can turn bits that were very simple looked at one-at-a-time insanely difficult in aggregate.

Anyway, work is proceeding. I had optimistically thought at one point earlier this week that by Monday I'd be drawing items full time but that's starting to look like a fever-dream.