Category Archives: Meta

Things are moving on the UGO/HeroMachine front! We have the first pass at a document transferring control of the IP to me, so I think we’re going to be good to go! More updates to follow as I get them.

After almost a decade of a wonderful partnership, as of January 1, 2012, UGO and HeroMachine are parting ways. My contract with them is up and will not be renewed, which means it’s time for me to move on into the next great adventure.

We’re still talking about what to do with the program and this site, and while I’m hopeful you’ll continue being able to enjoy the use of the program as you always have, we have yet to finalize anything.

As of this writing, UGO still owns all of the HeroMachine intellectual property. Since I am no longer employed by them, I don’t feel comfortable, legally, posting new content here. Until we get things squared away, therefore, I won’t be updating this site.

For now the HeroMachine 3 Alpha will remain freely available here, and all of the existing HeroMachine content on UGO.com (including the forums) will stay up as well. I can’t guarantee how long that will be the case, however, so I urge you (as always ) to create both text and image backups of all of your creations.

Whatever happens in the future, I want to thank everyone who’s either used the program in one of its many incarnations, or who has participated in this blog site. You’re a funny, creative, awesome group of folks and you are a large part of what has helped make this the best experience of my life.

I am also extremely grateful to UGO, a fantastic company and a great group of people who truly made all of this possible. I remain optimistic that we’ll be able to come to a long-term solution that results in the continued ability to bring your imagination to life with this set of tools. Regardless, I have nothing but good will towards them and will remain eternally and sincerely thankful for their support and partnership.

Folks, this is just a friendly reminder that the beginning of a new year is a great opportunity for you to protect your valuable creativity. In this case, you can do that by downloading any characters you have on the UGO Forums to your local hard drive for safe-keeping. We’ve had a couple of scares in the past with those boards in danger of going bye-bye, so it’s only prudent to take steps to safeguard your characters. The end of a year is the time to be thinking of that kind of thing.

On a related note, you should also take the time if you have it to make both text and image backups of your HeroMachine 3 characters. The change the browser companies made earlier in the year to start wiping out Flash cookies by default was a good lesson that it definitely pays to be safe rather than sorry. So if you haven’t been doing it before, load up the text strings of your favorite characters and paste them into Notepad or something just in case. Doing an image export is also a sound idea.

Create safely so you can safely create!

Today I submitted a request to my hosting company to move to a different type of service that is metered by memory usage instead of the flat rate I have been using up till now. I want to resolve the temporary outages once and for all, as well as prepare for the future. Hopefully this won’t break anything and you won’t even notice a difference, but there’s always the chance it will all melt down into a steaming pile of digital goo.

Just a heads-up in case you notice funkiness.

I’ll be out of the office from now until Saturday evening in Minneapolis helping my in-laws with computer problems (tech support for parents, woot!), so comment approval and such might be a bit slow. But never fear, I have content already written and scheduled so you hopefully won’t be left in a lurch!

I’ve got all the materials for Friday Night Fights with me as well, so I should be able to get to a computer to compile the votes first thing Friday morning.

Be sure to have the place cleaned up when I get back and no parties after ten!