Hero Lab 4e

Just checking in (I've had a busy month, so not much time to get this fixed).

I previously shunned GitHub because they were being so sneaky about making me sign up before giving me specifics about their system, and the last thing I need is another dozen abandoned accounts across the internet.

I'm leaning more toward a DMS rather than a repository just because the more I work on this, the less I want to gate patches behind specific software and arcane programmer rituals. A DMS would allow normal people to upload the normal files to submit patches. I settled on Codeplex because it did most of what I though was most important, but at this point I want it better than that - last thing I want to do is convince people to start using another system only to have to do it again if I find something better.

I'll keep everyone informed on my progress as it goes. I'm installing a few DMS options on my server to test them, and I may share links to see what people think when I get it narrowed down.

I know, I saw that. I'm going to look at GitHub again, but I'm pretty sure I rejected them before for a reason.

I'm probably going to just bite the bullet and go with a project or document manager to make it easier for everyone to edit, even if it makes it less convenient from the management side.

I said I was shooting for a March 15 update, but I've pushed it back a little because I'm hopeful there will be progress on a program level bug that I'm dealing with HL development on. If I don't hear anything soon (or else if I do hear something conclusive soon) I'll finish the patch.

It should be possible to get the right numbers. I am not confident of the timing of the program at that point so you may not be able to change the underlying stat for the power at that stage, but you should be able to do some simple math to have it add a modifier - just have two variables, one for Int modifier minus the melee attribute modifier, and one for Int modifier minus the ranged attribute modifier, which could then be applied as a bonus to the specified powers. I'd look at coding the power as a drop-down instead of checkbox though, since you need to pick between two options.

I've not spent that much time dealing with the in-play adjustments because my games have always drawn the line just after mechanical pencils as far as technology on the table. I don't think I've ever even looked at what it takes to make something happen in the in-game tab, so my help may be completely useless.

For a paper version, I would look at doing maybe a doubled line for power cards, with one line for without and one line for with; or possibly just a second set of all powers. Neither sounds like it will be a great choice, and both would require a lot of management from the user side.

If you create an issue with a general idea of what you fixed and attach the fixes (even all as one chunk) I'll pick the threads apart and merge it in. I'm shooting for a new package to be done by the Ides.

If you made the fixes directly into the files, that's actually even easier for me because I can do a compare/merge between the two versions. If that's what you've done, just zip the modified files up and attach the zip. (The zip is to make sure it's under the upload limit, especially if any fixes are in the item file).

If you are going to try to actually join the "team" please go to this post and tell me who you are on CodePlex. You can also tell me who you are over here when you request permission to join over there, but I'm more likely to believe you if you use your account here to say who you are over there than vise versa.

If you are logged into a CodePlex account, you can do basically anything over there other than edit documentation, change the maintained source code, or upload an updated game system file.

With a login you can create issues, comment on issues, upload files to issues, chat on the discussion board, download the source code, send merge requests, etc. Basically everything you can do over here, with no additional permission from me. Just a Microsoft or CodePlex account, and you are set.

If you want to maintain the documentation, you are free to "Join the Team" so to speak. If you are going to maintain the source code, you definitely should join.

Please respond to this post with your CodePlex account name if you want to be added in. Or you can send me a private message if you are shy about your CodePlex username getting tied to your CryptoKnight forum username, and I'll keep it a secret.

(I'm just a little nervous about letting anyone in to screw with my documentation - I can roll it back, but I'd rather not have to babysit that part of the project.)

Please let me know who you are if you are any of these people (if you are one of these, respond/PM here and I'll let you in):

• imdeepakchaudhary
• ironwood
• LakshimiGP

The longer I work on this, the more I'm just settling into using CodePlex to manage it. hl4e.codeplex.com is the site.

You will need to either sign in using an existing Microsoft Account or create a CodePlex account. After you are signed in, there is a link on the main page on the right to "Join Us" which will let you ask for permission to join the project. You do not have to do this. The only difference between "signed-in" and the base level of contributor is that you can edit wiki pages as a contributor. That's it. All the normal forking and commenting and everything else is the same.

If you have an account, you can access all of the source code files, you can create new issues and comment on existing ones, and view the documentation. If you create a fix for an issue, you can comment on that issue and attach the fix file. If you have a fix for an issue that doesn't have an issue created, just create an issue for it and upload your fix.

If you want to get into the actual code merge side of it, I would recommend you don't. It's scary and dark and full of silly things that coders think are good ideas that no one else in the world agrees with. This is also a code repository managed by a System Administrator (me) so I'm certain I'm not doing things "correctly" although it is working. If you think you still want to send fixes in using Git rather than uploading code to the issue tracker, I'm all for it because it will make my life easier.

You will again not need to join the project. Just fork the source code, then you can submit "Pull Requests" to the project from your fork, at which point we can test and approve the patch to integrate it into the system source code. I have basically no guidance to give you if you go this route - everything I know I figured out the hard way over the last month, and I'm certain it's worth every penny I spent on the lessons.

Gmail had very thoughtfully hidden all of the requests to join the project from me in my "Social" folder. Since I am extremely introverted, I ignore that folder like the plague, so I didn't see them. If you request access to the codeplex site I promise I will eventually notice, but if you want access more quickly, just comment in this thread and it will email me in a way that makes me notice.

The fact that most of us are not really programmers is why I am even now working on an easier way if I can find one - if everyone was a programmer I would have just set up a Subversion repository and posted the url. In fact, setting up Subversion was the very first thing I did because it took me all of 1 minute total to do.

I'm only considering systems that either cost nothing or will cost nothing for anyone other than me. Adding a barrier to user participation is the worst thing we could do. Which is also why I've been trying to find some kind of non-terrible web based code editor that will do its own checking in and out of the files from a repo. I've not had much luck at my 0$/user/month price point.

This is why I keep looping back to CodePlex but revising the procedure. At this point I think it's going to be the best - the interface is not horrible, it has a great bug tracker that allows for files to be attached to comments, has a forum that we may or may not use, a wiki system for documentation, and a Git back-end for tracking code and submissions for the few that aren't turned off by the oblique ways of code control.

The only real downside of CodePlex is it's run by Microsoft, and our project kinda skirts the real purpose of the site. I'm pretty sure we are never going to be big enough to draw any hellfire anyway.

Anyone interested should go look at the site and make an account - if you ask to be part of the project over there I'll let you in so you can look around.

The other option that I've been toying with is a document version system. I've hot one of them running (poorly) on my web hosting. It has the upside of making submitting fixes extremely easy, and it tracks versions automatically and has a robust document submission flow where uploads can be approved before included, and so on. The problem with it is that it doesn't have an issue tracker built in. Setting up an issue tracker and a wiki to bring us back to the full ecosystem would work, but then require multiple logins.

If anyone has any alternative ideas I'm up for basically anything. I've looked at a lot of project management systems which are slightly closer to what we want, but are usually far more regimented than we are in this project and usually don't have a way for people without user accounts to access the files.

I'm also still looking for a really good shared hosting xml editor. A WYSIWYM with modifiable schema would be ideal, but mostly I've only found ones that don't work or cost $20 (or way way more) per person, so not really a valid option for a tiny hobbyist coding project.

I can also post all of my scattered detritus of testing if anyone is interested in seeing if I discarded an option that would really be perfect.

It is such a strange issue that I can't get a handle on working around it. The weirdest part is how it changes what colors it uses depending on if the power cards are landscape or portrait. I've submitted a support request with Lone Wolf, but I'm not sure how far we will get. Does anyone know if we tried to get the developer involved when it first went wrong?

If I can get buy-in to putting issues and fixes into a repository, or even just issues into an issue tracker and fixes as files in comments on an issue tracker, I'd be willing to commit at least 1 year to maintaining it and generating builds every month.

Our current system is ok, but I am not finding new problems that matter to me because I'm not playing. I'm willing to fix things still because I have such deep and worthless knowledge of this system, but I don't normally have that much time. If I could quickly get a list of issues that aren't fixed I could spend time fixing a problem instead of looking for a problem to fix that someone else might also be working on.

At one point in the past I was working on a large fix and a version of it got merged into an update. That meant that in order for me to keep working on it I needed to manually go though my files and track down the parts that merged and the parts that were still only offline. I believe what I actually did was to shrug and stop fixing them rather than get the last half dozen powers fixed; clearly not a the best way. Having a more regimented merge would prevent this from happening - I could still post a temporary fix for the person who has the problem, but keep it from being merged to the update until it's completed. (I'm not trying to attack you Cryptoknight - you did great work and I appreciate you getting this forum up and keeping it going, packages and all).

The code actually works fine - with a change. I botched part of the code, so it wasn't detecting the magic item part of the power, because it was searching the character for the tag, not the power. Oops.

      ~if our 'color output' is disabled, do nothing special.
      if (hero.tagis[source.PowCardBW] <> 0) then
        ~if it's a daily check to see if it's magic.
      elseif (tagis[PowerUse.Daily] <> 0) then
        if (tagis[PowerClass.MagicItem] <> 0) then
            perform portal[name].setstyle[outTitleIt]
          endif
      ~if its daily but not magic, leave it like it is (I guess daily is default?)
      ~otherwise, if this is an encounter or at-will power, change the style
      ~appropriately.
      elseif (tagis[PowerUse.Encounter] <> 0) then
        ~if the power is from a magic item, change the title to be gold
        if (tagis[PowerClass.MagicItem] <> 0) then
            perform portal[letter].setstyle[outTitleEn]
            perform portal[name].setstyle[outTitleIt]
            perform portal[keywords].setstyle[outKeyAt]
          ~if it's not from a magic item, it's normal, so give the whole thing the power color
          else
            perform portal[letter].setstyle[outTitleEn]
            perform portal[name].setstyle[outTitleEn]
            perform portal[keywords].setstyle[outKeyEn]
          endif
      elseif (tagis[PowerUse.AtWill] <> 0) then
        if (tagis[PowerClass.MagicItem] <> 0) then
            perform portal[letter].setstyle[outTitleAt]
            perform portal[name].setstyle[outTitleIt]
            perform portal[keywords].setstyle[outKeyAt]
          else
            perform portal[letter].setstyle[outTitleAt]
            perform portal[name].setstyle[outTitleAt]
            perform portal[keywords].setstyle[outKeyAt]
          endif
        endif

This will work. Except it doesn't because the [name] is always changed to At-Will Green. I know the code works otherwise because if you set the [letter] to [outTitleIt] it makes that gold. Similarly you can change the letter of the encounter powers to Gold by changing the appropriate section.

Additionally if you change the At-Will (non-magic item) section to have gold or red as the style, it changes all of the bars that are green (At-Will and Encounter) into whatever style picked. I assume the same is the case for the keyword bar, but I didn't bother trying.

Wait, all of the encounter powers are failing to have the right colored top bar? How long has this been happening? Or is it just me (I know it's at least a little bit not me, because SAbel posted a picture of what's happening)?

I've actually spent the last hour rolling back my data files trying to discover where it all went wrong - I have a few character pdfs that were created in December 2014 that are correct (red bars for encounter powers). I've gotten to the point that using the 2014 profiles with 2014 data files still give me the messed up bar. The files that old wouldn't load without fixing the definitions file, because there was an issue that the newer versions of HL don't allow anymore, but after that everything loads. But when I generate the exact same character sheets from the exact same data and profile files it gives me the screwed up bar for encounter powers.

At this point, it's one of two things causing the problem. Windows 10 or a newer version of Hero Lab - I can possibly get a VM spinning to to test the Windows version idea, but I don't have backups of my download folders, so I can't roll that back to get a past version, and the website only has the newest flavor. I'm inclined to believe they broke something in the program - the fact that the 2014 files wouldn't even run without modification proves they at least did /something/ to the program, even if that change isn't the one that broke the encounter power cards.

The script also doesn't work. It doesn't seem to do anything at all. I didn't find a magic item with a daily power that was an actual power rather than just fluffy description of the power that should be, so I don't know if that would work, but the encounter one is definitely not working - which is no shock because the normal version of the encounter power is also not working.

The real question here is not how to change the colors of cards, but WTF is going on with that racial power that makes it do that.

The power doesn't have any special anything ("PowerClass" is "Race" but that's it). The powercards file where it formats the cards doesn't have a special rule for racial powers - there is no check for Race in there (but if this works for MagicItem, it will be trivial to make it work for Race as well if we want to format Racial powers differently). There isn't a style output for race that seems to apply, and after that I'm out of places to look for it. Do other Racial encounter powers do this? Dailies? It might do it with At-Wills, but we wouldn't be able to tell because it would just be green.