Category Archives: Meta

2011 HeroMachine Creators Club “Wanted” Poster

Hammerknight has absolutely knocked it out of the park with the 2011 HeroMachine Creators Club “Wanted” Poster. This thing is a real beauty, featuring some of the most prolific and talented creators who inhabit these here parts, each one done in an Old West “Wanted Poster” style. It’s just great, and I can’t thank Hammerknight enough for putting it together. Printed, it’s 24″x36″. Here’s the web-sized version, with links to the big one and various smaller sizes after that so you can use it as wallpaper if you like.

Again, just a fantastic job, Hammerknight, thank you so much for putting this together. It’s awesome!

Here are the links to the various sizes. Just right-click on the thumbnail and choose “Save Link As”, or you can click on the link directly to be taken to the image itself, whereupon you can use the File Save option in your browser.

Open Bragging Day

As I mentioned, I am currently out of town at my niece’s wedding and thus, can’t participate in an Open Critique Day today. We’ll pick that up again next week.

In the meantime, though, I thought I’d instead make this an “Open Bragging Day”, a chance for you to share one piece of art of which you are particularly proud. Show everyone your one “wow” piece that you think is a great example of what you try to do as a creator. Obviously (given the venue) it could be a HeroMachine character design, or you could scan/photograph a completely different piece and post it.

I’d like this to be a purely positive day for those willing to post. It’s “Attaboy Friday”, not a critique day, so try to think of something nice if you feel the urge to post a response.

Otherwise, put your artwork up and tell us why you’re proud of it!

(Apologies to the WWE for using their logo. It’s awesome, though.)

META: Out of town

I’ll be out of town from today through Saturday evening at my lovely niece Amber’s wedding in St. Francisville, Louisiana. We can literally see the Mississippi River from the church, so depending on how rapidly the flood waters are rolling, we could have a very interesting service indeed. I’m sure the fact that it’s on Friday the 13th is not a problem.

Anyway, I’ve scheduled Random Panels, Lone Wolf, and Power User Profile posts to tide you over during my absence. I’ll be checking in remotely via my iPhone to approve moderated comments and such.

Unfortunately I wasn’t able to find anyone to cover for the Open Critique Day on Friday, so we’ll have to wait for next week on that.

Have a good weekend!

META: Industry news

According to the Wall Street Journal’s “All Things Digital”, Hearst Publishing’s UGO (the company that now owns all things HeroMachine) will in the next few days announce that they have been bought out by NewsCorp’s IGN. I don’t know if it’s true or not, and if it is what it will mean for HeroMachine. I don’t know anything more than is in this press release but I wanted to give you all a heads-up just in case.

I will say that UGO has always been tremendously supportive both of me and the program. Hopefully if they are indeed merged into IGN, that will continue. We’ll just have to wait and see.

META: Delays

I just wanted to give everyone who was waiting on results for Character Contest 62 that I’m going to be later than usual posting results. There were a LOT of excellent entries and a) I’m having a hard time deciding, b) it takes longer to upload the images and format the post when there are lots of good ones, and c) my in-laws’ departure has been delayed by weather and illness so that’s slowing things down a fair bit as well.

Anyway, the results will go up before the day is done, but it will be later than I’d like. My apologies!

META: New home for custom items

I’ve just created a new forum on the UGO HeroMachine boards for the sharing of custom HM3 items along the lines of what Martian Blue proposed the other day. I’ve broken it down into several sub-folders so hopefully those searching for specific items will have an easier time finding them. If you have suggestions for different categories, by all means speak up. Currently they are:

  1. Male Clothing
  2. Female Clothing
  3. Backgrounds
  4. Companions / Complete Characters
  5. Headgear
  6. Weapons
  7. Miscellaneous Items

Currently they’re all empty, so you’ve got a chance to be the first one to add anything to each of them!

META: Let’s talk ownership

An interesting discussion has arisen in the context of the current Character Design contest, and I wanted to highlight it here for more thorough dissection. In a word, the subject is ownership.

Continue reading

WANTED! Creator Club

Hammerknight is looking to put together another poster featuring the folks who use HeroMachine to illustrate their imaginations, and asked me to put up this solicitation for the project. Looks like fun! See the poster itself for submission deadlines, details, etc.

Help for Ian

Longtime reader and sometimes contributor Ian Healy asked me to pass along this request for some creative help:

Crap in a hat! My computer is broken and my queue is empty! I’m looking. For some emergency filler strips for the next week (http://www.ianthealy.com/comic/). If you ever wanted to submit a guest comic strip, now is the time. It doesn’t have to be LEGO, but it should feature characters of the S-Team in some way. Funny and creative is a bonus. Email your submissions to ian@ianthealy.com. I hope to see an overflowing inbox shortly…

If you’ve always wanted to have your comics ideas published, now’s your chance!

HM3: Coding updates and changes

I wanted to make sure you all know that I am currently starting on the Great Code Rewrite. And I want you to know that because when the next release goes live, your old save files may or may not work. That’s the problem with using alpha or beta software; when things change, they might change in a big, big way.

Now, what’s more likely to happen is that when you load an old character in the new setup, the layers might be all messed up. Although that happens now, too. Or, it might be that everything stays the same with regards to saving and loading, I just don’t know yet. But it’s a possibility, and I want to be sure you’re aware of it so you can be sure to have JPG or PNG backup hard copies of your favorite guys and gals.

You can also make a backup copy of the .SOL files that Flash uses to save your guys. I’ll probably keep the old (current) alpha version “live” for a little while under another name (so heromacine3a.swf or something). If I do that, then you should be able to go in and change the directory name where these .SOL files are kept to that name and still be able to access your characters.

To refresh, here’s the info on how the saving works currently:

The saved Flash shared object library files (.sol for you Windows users) are LIKE cookies, but they are NOT actual cookies. They are not stored in the shared internet data files and will not be deleted if you erase all your cookies. You can only remove them by right-clicking on the movie, and going to Flash Settings, removing them there.

Violodion found them in his Windows installation at %AppData%MacromediaFlash Player#SharedObjects\www.heromachine.comhm3

He was able to copy those and move them to another computer in the same directory and load his characters there.

On my Mac they are in HD / User / / Library / Preferences / Macromedia / Flash Player / #SharedObjects / / https://www.heromachine.com / hm3 / heromachine3.swf / hmcharacters.sol