Herolab Online
 

Seriously why are you having herolab online support only starfinder? how about systems people actually play.

It's been said a few times in the forum, that they are starting HLO with Starfinder, and they may eventually start moving other systems into the fold, AFTER they iron all the kinks out.

Correct. Pathfinder is #2 on the list for HLO. Doing Starfinder first lets us get something released and stress-tested in the wild relatively quickly, without having to immediately deal with Pathfinder's huge number of individually small pieces of mechanical weirdness affecting the new UI.

While I am appreciative of your current efforts with HLO, until it includes these things noted above in your "Future Roadmap", the HLO software is of only passing interest and of meager utility to Starfinder GMs.

I use Herolab for Pathfinder to run my game. I can't use HLO to run Starfinder in the same manner. The functionality to support GMs is just not there.

Lone Wolf has reasonably raised expectations among your customer base based upon the current offerings for HL for Pathfinder and how we use it. Until you can match the current software with HLO for Starfinder, it's difficult for those efforts to be received in a positive light.

GMs need a superset of what players need. Until HLO is largely complete for players, there's really no point in investing effort on the GM side of things, since HLO won't be useful to anyone without full player support. So the first step is getting everything in place for players. After that, we focus on the GM tools. :)

personally I am loving HLO

Good to hear!

One question I have, though, is if you are going to wait until Starfinder GMs have all they need before you provide HLO to Pathfinder players. Seems to me if you can get a player version available to Pathfinder players then you can increase your income by a fair amount and fairly quickly. Then after that you can focus on the GM needs for Starfinder and/or Pathfinder. Of course that's all said without seeing the dev side of things, but just the same there's a massive amount of anticipation for players to get HLO for Pathfinder!

Our Pathfinder group is waiting for it to be available so we can start using it in our Giantslayer campaign (out of 1 GM and 5 players, only one player doesn't use HL). We're also hoping it won't be to long until RealmWorks has the Giantslayer campaign available in the content store, so I can pick up a GM copy for me and a player copy for all 5 of our players.

We're nearing the last 3rd of book 2, and would like to get all these cool techs going for us (HLO and RW) before we get too much further.

Any info on when either of these will be available would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks for your ridiculously amazing products Lone Wolf!

We don't have a specific timeframe for this yet, but it will be different peop le doing most of the work for Pathfinder and the GM features, so that kind of thing will generally happen in parallel. For most of PF (barring really weird stuff, like a Barroom Brawler -> Martial Focus -> Advanced Weapon Training -> Focused Weapon feat chain where you need to supply class features created by feats created by class features created by feats) we will be able to reuse what we've already made for Starfinder.

Cough 5e Cough...

You know since that's what the majority of the market is playing.

Thanks Ian!

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

*cough*D&D Beyond*cough*

Why would they not not focus on the low hanging fruit where there is a need, and not any officially supported competition?

Because they are standing at a point of change. A point where they can hold their head up high and claim they are the market leader I character generation tools. Because they could open their pockets up to a bigger market that is addicted to digital tools.

I bought HERO LAB. It is the initial price hurdle you jump before you can extend the product to have support for various RPGs.

What is the timeline for getting Starfinder to the core Hero Lab product?

There is no way I am buying into a new system - if you want to compete with yourself, have a good time. When I bought Hero Lab, I had certain expectations about being able to extend it and observing a different product get Starfinder support is immensely disappointing and worrisome.

EDIT: This is from the store page for Hero Lab:

"We license the right to produce data packages for almost every game system Hero Lab supports. That means we're working directly with the companies that produce your favorite games, so we can ensure that our software supports their games optimally."

You might want to amend to include 'except for IPs we wish to put in other products" or pull it entirely since it is less than truthful.

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They don't currently have plans to make Starfinder for desktop Herolab. You also do not have to buy a "new system" to use HLO, what you buy for desktop will be usable for HLO once the support is added. They have mentioned a migration fee for Pathfinder but you then get a pretty much equal credit for the server maintenance fee.

So the 80+ hours (and that is a conservative estimate) I have invested in adding custom settings and races will transport to HLO? I will be able to use that same knowledge gleaned from legacy with HLO to continue to make new rules for custom settings and races?

Correct on all counts.

One thing I'll warn you is that once we have PF and PF user content ready for HLO, any custom classes or archetypes may take some tweaking for it. Any needed adjustments should be straightforward, though, since it's about unifying how some similar-but-not-identical ways of doing things work across multiple game systems.