Bug Fixes - reporting and DIY?

[PghDrake]

Hi folks, new here but I want to thank everyone for the Feats bug fixes and the Themes that I have running great now on my product.  Makes such a big difference, thank you!!

I'm somewhat technical and usually pick up on things quickly - but how tough is it to make fixes in HL without breaking the whole product?   Is there a guide somewhere on how to do this, or are you folks mostly self-taught?  Since there's clearly no more support on this product, I'd really like to make it work a little better for me.

One example I came across recently was when I made a Drow Assassin who worships Lloth.  I get an error that he's not the appropriate alignment to worship Lloth even if I have him set as Evil or Chaotic Evil.  I'm sure this is a minor fix that I could take care of myself if I understood the basic steps and it was easy enough to get into.

If it IS very complicated then are you folks still taking requests for bug fixes and working on them? 

Thanks for the info - and for all the great resources here!

-Drake

[Cryptoknight]

Generally it's not too difficult to use the editor, but it seems like you're running into an evaluation rule... generally it's not too hard to make an edit to replace a rule, but you have to find it first, and I don't know where the deity evaluation rules are in the editor, it might be like with Themes where Daphne had to literally change the rules system to incorporate new tabs.

[PghDrake]

Ok...another quick question - once I have a fix, how do I retain it?  Meaning, if I need to reinstall the program or if I want to have the fix on another PC, do I have to do everything from scratch or is there an easier way to keep the changes?

For the themes, I put all the files I downloaded from here onto a backup drive just in case I lose this drive.

-Drake

[Cryptoknight]

You'll know which files you edited, if you use the HLExport application you can export a .hl file that you can just double click to import on another machine. 

As for the themes... I'd download the .hl files from here for those as well... makes reinstallation a breeze.

[MagicSN]

Basically there are two things - the .dat files which are the "official" script files, and then .user files which are User Script files. When you do fixes you usually do .user files (and can specify that "this feat in the user file REPLACES the feat by this name from the official files - making the fixed version replace the buggy version).

Basically what I do is I backup all my .user files, and when I would need to reinstall I just install them again (but currently I am mainly on the (inofficial) D&D Next Hero Lab and there I directly edit the .dat files anyways as I did the complete implementation for Next ;-)

With 4e the big issue is that Wolflair has no licence to do a character editor, so they basically provice a script with which a player can generate the .dat files out of the content on the WotC webpage (using his user login on his DDI subscription). This process is not perfect and is the reason of those many bugs.

As to how I learned how to do this stuff - for one thing I read the existing scripts and analyzed them (and often did some trial-and-error). For another, there is a help menu in Hero Lab which brings you to a webpage by Wolflair where a lot of things are explained (script functions and whatever). Also the whole script language has similarities to other script languages (sometimes this was evil - I am working on Python Scripts at my job, and sometimes I got confused between Hero Lab Scripting syntax and Python Syntax - either at the job or at home when coding with Hero Lab ;-) ) Tiny stuff like is a comparision = or == and such...