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.
- 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.
- I am working on Neckwear now, with probably a quick dash into Sleeves to follow.
- 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.
- 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.
- The ability to specify a size when saving as a JPG/PNG would be very helpful.
- 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?
