After way too many years, I can hardly believe that the return of HeroMachine 3 as a non-Flash, fully-functional character creator is not just very real, but quite imminent. Here’s a proof-of-life screenshot:
Beta testing is under way and so far it looks exceptionally positive. If it continues to go well, we may have something ready for you all to use as early as next week.
The New Hotness
Here’s what’s new in the upcoming HeroMachine 3 “Phoenix Edition”.
Platform
- No Flash required: runs natively in any modern browser, including mobile and tablet
- Future-proof: built on open web standards (SVG, JS) that will never be deprecated
- Faster loading: items fetched on demand and cached, no massive upfront download
New Capabilities
- Shareable URLs: compress your character into a link anyone can open and edit
- Direct canvas manipulation: drag to move, Shift+drag to scale, Alt+drag to
rotate items right on the canvas - Intuitive rotation: mouse rotation follows your grab point naturally, like
spinning a real object - Keyboard shortcuts: Ctrl+Z undo, Ctrl+Shift+Z redo, Delete to remove, arrow keys to nudge
- Legacy save import: load your original HM3 Flash XML save files into the new app
- Full screen mode: take over the whole screen for a massive canvas — no more tiny fixed window
- Resizable control panel: drag to widen for more thumbnails per row, persists across sessions
- On-canvas text editing: add custom text to your designs with live preview
Improved
- Better color swatches: save to specific slots, persisted across sessions
- Better export: export the current view exactly as you see it, with custom fonts properly embedded
- Smarter item switching: colors and transforms carry forward when swapping items in a slot
We Need New Starters!
If you can still use HM3 in the Flash version (see instructions here), or if you have any old saves you think would work, I’d love to get some new options for “Starter templates”. These are pre-set characters that have all the right Sets loaded to start creating that can be loaded easily and quickly from the Load menu to help new users get started creating quickly.
The categories I’m thinking of (and which are totally open to change so comment below if you have suggestions) are:
Ones We’re Keeping
- Male Fantasy Warrior
- Female Fantasy Warrior
New (pending community feedback)
- Male Fantasy Mage: robes, staff, hat/hood
- Female Fantasy Rogue: hooded, daggers, light armor
- Male Sci-Fi Soldier: tech armor, rifle, helmet
- Female Sci-Fi Officer: spandex/tech top, pistol, visor
- Male Superhero: spandex, cape, mask, boots
- Female Superhero: spandex, cape, mask
- Male Modern/Street: coat, pants, hat
- Monster/Creature: monster body, alien head, claws
We’ll also be trimming some of the less useful existing starters to make room. Submissions should keep in mind these general guidelines:
- SFW: This is still a kid-friendly operation so let’s keep it clean
- Minimal transformations, masks, and glows: These are meant to be beginner-friendly starters more than showcases for the coolness
- No copyright infringement: Some similarities to published characters may be unavoidable due to the limited nature of our human understanding of the universe, but keep them as original as you can
- Submitting: Either paste your save string below in a comment, submit it through the contact form, or email Jeff directly with the save string either as text or in an attached TXT/XML file to afdstudios@gmail.com.
Getting My House In Order & Ready for Friends
In addition to working on the non-Flash app version, I’ve been unmothballing this site to get it ready to actually be used again. It had fallen prey to several rounds of spam bots resulting in – I kid you not – 3.6 million spam users being registered. I’ve at long last got all of that cleaned up and the site is doing much better, running on the latest versions of WordPress and PHP, with extra security in place to hopefully stop that from happening again.
The spams
I had 3.6 million spam user registrations, accumulated over ~6 years, peaking at 25,000+/day in 2022. Each fake account created ~24 wp_usermeta rows, resulting in 87 million rows consuming 16 GB alone. It. Was. Massive. Here’s a summary:
| Metric | Before | After | Reduction |
|---|---|---|---|
| Total database size | 21 GB | 764 MB | 96.4% |
| User accounts | 3,639,558 | 945 | 99.97% |
| Usermeta rows | ~87 million | 24,150 | 99.97% |
| Spam pending posts | 3,521 | 3 | 99.9% |
| Spam tags | 62,204 | 84 | 99.9% |
This preserved 945 real users out of 3.6 million.
Cry ‘Havoc’!
But let’s hold off on letting slip the dogs of war. Comments on new posts (younger than 180 days old, which is this one and … yeah, one other) are now open, as are the forums. You don’t (and won’t) have to be registered to use the app, but you will have to be registered to comment or make Forum posts, just like it’s always been.
What’s next?
Hopefully next week you’ll see an announcement here that the HeroMachine 3 page will have the new app in place and available and you can start creating!
