Quote:
Originally Posted by Duggan
Something which I definitely hope will change in the future since one of the great advantages of Hero Lab (and one of the things that helped let Lone Wolf support some of the less popular systems) was the editing system. It let GMs create their own custom material for their campaigns and it let users submit fixes, expansions, and the like for supplemental material.
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This is vastly harder within HLO than Classic for one very simple reason. We need to safeguard against user errors with PERFECT success. HLO is a shared resource on a common server that all users access. If a user error is not caught, it can cause everything to fail for everyone. Within Classic, the only one impacted by a user error is the user himself. Not within HLO.
This gets even more complex due HL scripting being an pretty powerful language. For example, it would be trivial in a script to introduce an infinite loop. It's also quite possible to accomplish that in a non-obvious way that spans multiple scripts and procedures. Obviously, an infinite loop would completely screw all other users on the server at that time, so we'd have to detect such errors and deal with them in some reasonable way that doesn't negatively impact the system while giving reasonable feedback to the creating user.
That's just one basic example of hundreds (perhaps thousands) that need to be dealt with.
We've made some inroads towards this goal, but we still have a LOT of work yet to do. So this is something that's still quite a ways off from being exposed to users.
As an interim solution, we've been providing significantly more flexibility to let users customize elements of characters directly within the product, which I believe has greatly reduced the need for the editing system. We have more enhancements along these lines planned, which should allow users to more readily fill in the remaining gaps.