Slower response times in HL V8.8b #832?
 

I downloaded and installed V8.8 of Hero Lab this evening, and moving around feels a lot slower than the previous release did.

For example, when creating a new Pathfinder character, just clicking the up arrow to change the starting level from 1 to 2 take almost 3 second to update the user interface. Clicking 11 times to take a new character from 1 to 12 takes nearly 20 seconds to register in the user interface.

Is this a side effect of the code changes in V8.8b on an old/slow machine like mine, or is this a situation where I need to uninstall and reinstall Hero Labs?

("Old machine" means 1.7 Ghz, i5-3317U CPU, running Windows 8.1).

It seems slower to me too, both on the desktop and the laptop.

Well, I tried running Pathfinder today on my laptop and it was horrible. Click something in the Tactical Console, wait around for it to respond, click the next thing in the Tactical Console... It literally added an extra hour to the fight.

Afterwards I tried rolling back to 8.8, but it didn't work because I had updated Pathfinder. :(


Edited to add: I played around with it in Savage Worlds, M&M3 and 4e and it seems to be a Pathfinder thing (at least among systems I own).

I have noticed too that Hero lab 8.8b and the latest Pathfinder are dreadfully slow when interacting with a character. I was building a level 20 Wizard and adding spells to the spell book was a exercise in frustration. Taking a spell from level and adding 7 level took about 5 seconds. Going to the Adjustment tab and enabling a spell adjustment was slow as well it took about 2 seconds to update.

This behavior is on all 3 computers that I use Hero Lab on. A desktop and 2 laptops all computers have a minimum of 8 GB of RAM and relatively modern CPU's, and all with SSD where Hero lab is installed.

The group I played with last Wednesday said the same things so it is not my related to the PC in question.

I rolled one of the laptops back to 8.8 and the slowness went away and I was able to level up and down spells normally. Enabling spell adjustments was normal as well.

I just noticed 8.8c is up

This is definitely something that should not be happening, and something we are looking into right now. This does not appear to be happening (at least to a noticeable extent) here with our machines, so I would appreciate knowing as much as possible about your setups.

Probably your best bet is to send us an email at support@wolflair.com and mention this issue and my name (Dave Miller), and that will allow us to communicate more directly and will allow us to go back and forth easier if necessary.

Note that there was a bug fix release this morning that might possibly affect this situation, so you might want to try that out as well.

I just downloaded 8.8c and it did not resolve the issue, in fact it seems a little worse. I rolled back to 8.8 and the issue is not present.

I will be sending a ticket into support with the information.

Edit: Sent email to support at 12:50 PM EST.

In the "Develop" menu, there is an option called "Disable Fast Evaluation for Game".

It looks like the logic has been reversed. If you make sure that this option IS ticked, then the response time improves.

(I already have a ticket open.)

Ok, so it only halves the speed of changing my strength from 18 to 19 on my laptop, down from 6 seconds to 3 seconds with 8.8b; or 3 seconds down to 1.5 seconds with 8.8c.

Beat me to it, Farling! Yes indeedy. "Disable Fast Evaluation for Game" is your immediate fix while this gets sorted.

This suggests that the bug lies in one of the intended enhancements - it's taking much longer than it's supposed to. Then, when you turn off all the speed enhancements that have been added over the last year or two, you go back to what HL was a few years ago, which happens to be somewhat better than what the bug is causing now, but also not as good as it should be.


As Dave asked in post #6, please contact support, so that you can help him track down exactly which speed enhancement is the problem here.