Category Archives: Meta

Thanks to a program called Ruffle, Flash content can now be shown in browsers again! Head on over to the HeroMachine 2 page and start creating your own character portraits like you did back in the day!

I've had some reports of folks who have downloaded HeroMachine 2 not getting the full list of component sets beyond Standard.

I just spent the last hour or so trying out various things and I was able to replicate the issue on my Mac. It looks like the core problem is that browsers now have to be explicitly told that it's ok to trust Flash content that loads from your local hard drive. Otherwise it won't allow the browser to read the components.txt file that has the list of all the other, non-Standard components in it.

It's a bit of a hassle to fix, but I was able to get it working. Here's how.

First, I wasn't able to get Chrome to work properly, which is a bummer because that's my main browser of choice. However, I was ultimately able to get both Firefox and Safari to load all the sets normally.

For both Safari and Firefox, the first step is to get your browser to trust the local folder where you've stored heromachine.html and heromachine.swf. Directions for doing that are at this link https://forums.adobe.com/thread/2210842 but I'll paste them here for convenience:

For Internet Explorer, Edge, Firefox, Opera and Safari:

On the affected system, go to the Flash Player Settings Manager:

• Mac: System Preferences > Flash Player
•  Windows: Control Panel > Flash Player
• Select the Advanced tab
• In the Developer Tools section, click the Trusted Location Settings button
• Click the "Add..." button and add relevant files and folders to the list

You can either manually navigate to the folder and control-click the htm, swf, and txt files, or you can copy the URL your local HeroMachine is in from your browser window. Like in my case, it was file:///Users/jhebert/Downloads/hmach25/. Paste that into the text box that appears when you click the "Add..." button in the instructions above.

Once that's done, in theory you should be able to close and reopen your browser and the list should be complete. In my case, I wasn't able to see any Flash content because I hadn't yet installed the Flash Player plugin for either Safari or Firefox, but once I went to https://get.adobe.com/flashplayer/ and installed it, I was up and working in Safari.

Firefox, however, threw one more hurdle at me. By default it now requires all Flash content to load from a site that starts with http: or https:, which means that local content (which loads from file://) won't work. To fix that, I found this article -- https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1172126 -- which said to do this:

There is a new security setting in Firefox 55 that supersedes everything else. Only SWF files retrieved on http:// or https:// addresses are played (not file://, ftp://, etc.). If you want to revert to the previous behavior:

(1) In a new tab, type or paste about:config in the address bar and press Enter/Return. Click the button promising to be careful.

(2) In the search box above the list, type or paste plug*ht and pause while the list is filtered

(3) Double-click the plugins.http_https_only preference to switch the value from true to false 

Once I did that it all worked like it is supposed to.

I know this is all a big hassle and I wish there were some other way around it. But browsers have been getting more and more aggressive with how they handle Flash content, so there are ever more hoops to jump through. Hopefully this helps someone down the line, though.