Category Archives: Meta

Here's the overall status of HeroMachine 3 as far as I know. Please let me know in comments where you think it is, where it needs to be, and what I ought to be doing next.

1. I see the item population process as anywhere from a third to a half done. Almost all of the Standard sets are in, but I still have almost all of the non-Standard stuff to migrate. That's going to take a while.
2. I am working on Neckwear now, with probably a quick dash into Sleeves to follow.
3. Saving/Loading of characters is only minimally functional. Layer order is getting messed up on load, some items may be missing (although that might just be an artifact of the layering problem) on load, and the "Multiple/Single" setting for each slot is not reset, resulting in lots of confusion.
4. Printing whenever you have a Hand loaded makes the character image occupy just a tiny corner of the resulting image. This makes saving as a JPG/PNG or printing fairly limited in value.
5. The ability to specify a size when saving as a JPG/PNG would be very helpful.
6. The program gets very slow, sometimes to the point of crashing, when a high number of items is loaded, particularly when patterning.

I think that hits the high priority stuff. I want to get Newckwear and Sleeves knocked out, then focus on the programming stuff again for a week or two.

I'd like to hear if that list seems right to you, what your specific experiences have been with it, and how you think the program's shaping up overall in a broader sense. Is it easy enough to figure out? Does it confuse you? What could be done at a higher level to make it all better? Has it met, exceeded, or fallen short of what you would want in a character creator?

The latest on HeroMachine 3 development is that I am working on the Load/Save code, which we've been badly in need of for some time. The good news is the fundamental trick that was needed turned out to be much easier than I feared it would be; I know how to do what needs to be done and have that basic bit already in place.

The bad news is all the other stuff that has to surround that heart. There's a lot of it, and it's going to take a while to crank out.

To elaborate, I have the bit in place that takes all the items you've put together and saves them to your local hard drive, then reloads them -- IF you already have all the preview sets loaded up. But I still have to write the part that cranks through each item set you need, loads it up, then moves on to the next one until they're all loaded. And I have to write all the error checking and dialog boxing -- "Are you sure you want to load/save a previous character, this will lose your current one" and "Which character do you want to load" and the like. For each of those you have to provide functionality based on what the user picks -- ok or cancel -- and all the associated baggage that goes along with it.

Along the way you have to be sure you're resetting all the other stuff that needs to be reset like variable names, toggle button settings, arrays, and the like.

So while the basics turned out to be easy enough, there's still a lot of grunt work to go through to make it all work usefully. Which is going to take a while, probably about a week.

In the meantime, I head to Oregon tomorrow for a long weekend, which means I won't be back to work on HeroMachine stuff till Tuesday.

I've got posts scheduled to go up while I'm out, and I should be able to access everything through my iPhone to approve moderated posts and such, but I won't be releasing any new updates or items or anything.

I've updated the HeroMachine FAQ page with HeroMachine 3-related material. Holler if you think of any I left out.