We have 5e in mind, but it's not top of the list because (a) we can't actually make all of it available ourselves because of the incomplete SRD, and (b) we don't have user content functionality for HLO yet to let people fill in the missing parts themselves.

Reading between the lines... WotC sucks.

Only if you want to work with them.
Or work for them.
Or be their agent.
Or be their customer.
Or...

Many thanks for helping out while my brain recovered from the insane work hours this week, Ian! You're the best!

Poor Ian has been chained to his desk in the den for so long that he's a touch behind on the specifics. I'll try to ensure he gets out more. ;) We absolutely plan to bring the 5ESRD to Hero Lab Online and we are also working toward making the authoring kit available in the future. We aren't there yet, but it is a priority!

Additionally, we have nothing against WoTC, and are actively pursuing an official 5E license. While nothing is set in stone, I have hope that the future of HLO will one day include licensed 5E content. :)

One other pretty nice upside here: once we do get to having user content, it will be much, much easier to add custom UI elements, or to handle complicated class' resource pools without the "split everything into multiple configurables" trick from desktop HL. This will make anybody who maintains custom classes or rules subsystems happy, and will make it much easier for archetypes and other "drop in" mechanics to provide a nice interface for new abilities.

Why this sounds great it also makes me very worried. I mean its already been confirmed that to do custom UI for say Pathfinder requires three different scripts and logic in the near future. I will need to support HLC windows/mac, HLC iPad (yes iPad has its own unique logic) and now HLO scripts.

Are you now saying that in addition to the above I will have to have different solutions for HLC and HLO when dealing with configurables? I am not seeing how that is a benefit here of needing to support three totally different designs and script logic.

I am starting to feel I am programming in the android world and have to deal with a fractured market place. :(

If I was being paid to do the above work by companies I can see it not being a huge deal. But as a free contributor needing to produce three times the amount code to make a product usable is not something I am looking forward too. :(

Hopefully this is just another 'off the cuff' comment and is leaving out tons of details. :)

Most of the "magic", with option sets as an open-ended upgrade on the current setup of multiple ability pools and linked configurables, will work fine in the desktop HL engine, so that part just depends on us updating existing game systems for it. And we have to do that anyway if we want to use them in HLO. ;)

The only thing that can't easily be backported to desktop HL is the different template system, and that only applies to the parts that can't be automatically generated, which I think would actually be pretty limited for the PF Community Pack.

I am not 100% following what your trying to say because I am blind to HLO currently. I guess I will just wait and see how things actually fall out before I get too worried about stuff. :)

The tl;dr version is that we intend for a lot of this new magic to automatically generate UIs without any manual scripting needed to display anything that fits into the standard pattern used for the game system, and we have things in mind that should minimize the amount of work needed for non-standard subsystems like PoW and SoP.

That would be really sweet! Looking forward to this! :) :D