Category Archives: News & Updates

I just updated the HeroMachine 3 alpha to A.20, which adds a cap of 20 actions to the number of undo levels. If that's not enough, let me know -- it's easy enough to change.

If you have more than 20 saved characters, I'd strongly encourage you to make a backup of your hmcharacters.sol file before you do too much today. This shouldn't impact the save file at all, but ... yeah, it makes me nervous, too. Better safe than sorry.

Hopefully this will stop the irritating Flash pop-up asking how much file space you want. Although, if you see that, just right-click on the HeroMachine app, choose "Settings" from the flyout, click the little folder icon, then set the file size to the next level up. 1MB usually works. You can check the "Don't bother me again" box if you want as well.

But like I said, hopefully this will stop it from being an issue at all.

I've updated the main HeroMachine 3 Alpha application to incorporate the "Undo" feature I mentioned yesterday. Testing has revealed it doesn't cause the Apocalypse, so we're good to go. Please let me know if you have any issues with this release.

For those who missed the post yesterday, this is the new "Undo" button:

It'll undo until there's nothing else to undo. Color changes, scaling, rotation, moving an item with either the mouse or the transform buttons, alpha changes, deletions, additions, "color all skin/hair", "Clear All", you name it, you can probably undo it, except for transformations using the "All Items" grouping, since I'll be changing how that works in the relatively near future.

Hope you like it!

When you save your character image in HeroMachine 3, it will now have the name of your character (if any) as the default file name instead of "hm3-beta". The name comes from the last character you saved or loaded.

Note that this is preparation for the long-awaited "quick save" and "undo" features, the next major code change initiative. Woot!

I've just added a third format option when exporting your character's image in HM3 -- "PNG (transparent 400x600)". This is basically just adding in an option for the way it used to be.

When you click it, the size gets reset to 400x600, the Area gets reset to "Character", and all other options are grayed out since you can't make any of the other sizes or head shots export with transparency. Choosing regular old PNG or JPG turns them all back on, though.

This should help those, like DiCicatriz, who use the characters with transparent backgrounds to paste into an image editor for either larger group shots, or just to have in a custom setting.

Let me know if you run into any problems using it. All other options will continue to export with a white background.

I have very good news, and mildly bad news. The very good news is that I have just uploaded the latest update to the HeroMachine Alpha that allows you to output your creation at a wide variety of sizes, either as the full character or a portrait view, as a JPG or PNG, and in regular or widescreen format.

The mildly bad news is, saving as a PNG no longer puts your character on a transparent background -- it's a solid white. I tried to figure out a way around it, but given the various other constraints Flash put on me it was the only way to get output at anything but the basic size.

Here is the new menu, which you see now when you press either the "Save as JPG" or "Save as PNG" button:

If you have trouble seeing the images, the sizes are:

• 200x300
• 400x600
• 500x750
• 800x1200
• 1200x1800
• 1600x2400
• 800x600 (widescreen)
• 1280x1024 (widescreen)
• 1600x1200 (widescreen)
• 2048x1536 (widescreen)

My version of Flash has a maximum dimension limitation of something like 2800 pixels, so we couldn't do the ridiculously ginormous size, just the mostly ginormous ones.

In laying all this out it didn't make sense to have "widescreen" be a separate toggle button, so now the program just automatically does it all for you depending on which set of dimensions you choose.

I hope you like the new feature, and please let me know if you run into any problems with it. The larger sizes naturally take longer to render, so don't be surprised if the pop up window just sits there for ten to thirty seconds thinking.

I didn't touch the save/load code or anything else in this release except the export functions.

Much to my dismay I have just discovered that at least one of the major changes I made to HeroMachine 3 got lost somewhere in the file confusion I had a couple of days ago. I haven't had the heart to check and see just how much of the bug fixing was destroyed. The backup I thought I had turned out to not be a backup, too. If I have to rewrite all the stuff I did last week ... man, I might have to cry.

In the morning when I am feeling better I will look into it further, but that's why all of a sudden things started coming up in the wrong slot, layers were hosed up, etc. It's because only some of the fixes turned out to be in the version I uploaded. I don't know what happened ... there was a weird episode where one of the working versions didn't load, and I renamed and reloaded some backups, and then ... I don't know. Feh.

More to come tomorrow when I know more. This sucks. But hopefully I can get it fixed sooner rather than later.

I've just updated the HeroMachine 3 Alpha so any custom colors and swatches your character has will now be both saved and loaded. Old characters saved prior to this release will not be affected in any way.

If you have a bunch of custom colors active, then you load a previously saved character, your current custom colors won't be overwritten with white -- only non-white custom colors from the saved character get applied. In other words, your custom palette doesn't get wiped out by loading a save.

What that means is, you could in theory set up a whole suite of custom colors that you use a lot, and then save that "character" as something like "Jeff's Custom Colors". When you start a new session and character, the first thing you could do would be to load "Jeff's Custom Colors", and all the colors you'd saved would now be active. It's a way of saving your palette between sessions.

I also changed the default size for "Save as JPG/PNG" to 500x750.

The "Save" box now goes away when you click "OK".

Finally, I implemented a small bug fix where the custom color picker was showing on top of the save/load dialog box.

Please let me know if you have any problems with the release, and enjoy, all you custom color creators!

I have just uploaded a fairly major change to the way HeroMachine 3 handles saving and loading characters, and how it masks and layers items. Details after the jump, but the take-away is that going forward you should have a lot fewer problems loading and saving. And hopefully the "stuck item" bug will go away too.

All of your previously saved characters should still be there, so you won't lose anything. It all ought to just work better.

I also want to give a special shout-out to everyone who contributed in the last thread on this subject, you all helped a lot. Particular thanks go to Violet, who sent me her saved-character .sol file, and Panner, who gave some exceptionally helpful, detailed, and specific bug reports that were incredibly helpful for tracking down all this. Thanks a ton!

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