Unable to import HL files to RW

Hello, I have been unable to import HL. Every time I attempt to import a file RW stats the version is unable to import due to HL being out of date. But my HL is up to date and I don't know what to do to import the files

Molash

Your version of HL is up to date, but the portfolio itself was likely saved with an older version of HL, and it's the version used to save the portfolio that matters.

Open the portfolio within HL, modify it in some innocuous way (e.g. add a character to the name and then delete the character), and save the portfolio. You should now be able import the portfolio into RW.

Hope this helps!

i have attempted this, all it does is crash RW. I have even attempted to create a new hero in hero lab and it still crashs RW

Have you submitted a help desk ticket yet? If you can submit one from within Realm Works I believe it will include extra information they can use for troubleshooting. Otherwise you can use the website's submission page, and will want to include as much detail as possible. Since your issue involves two products, I would suggest erring on the side of too much information - so include details such as which Hero Lab modules you've purchased, what game system you are creating the character in (no guarantee that ShadowRun 3 and Pathfinder data files will behave the same way, for example).

I went to try this myself and had a problem, but not the same problem.

My characters (last saved with an up-to-date Hero Lab) load into Realm Works fine and I can view them in RW, but when I go to look at them in Hero Lab it starts in Demo mode. I installed Hero Lab to a different place than the default and use -dataroot to put the game data in the same directory as the application, and this is the same thing that happens if Hero Lab is started without the -dataroot.

Parody said:

I went to try this myself and had a problem, but not the same problem.

My characters (last saved with an up-to-date Hero Lab) load into Realm Works fine and I can view them in RW, but when I go to look at them in Hero Lab it starts in Demo mode. I installed Hero Lab to a different place than the default and use -dataroot to put the game data in the same directory as the application, and this is the same thing that happens if Hero Lab is started without the -dataroot.

Click to expand...

What happens if you double-click on the .por file from the Windows file Browser? If HL enters demo mode then you need to change the way that windows launches the HL application (I don't know how to change that, but it is a thing to change in Windows, not HL).

Farling said:

What happens if you double-click on the .por file from the Windows file Browser? If HL enters demo mode then you need to change the way that windows launches the HL application (I don't know how to change that, but it is a thing to change in Windows, not HL).

Click to expand...

They open just fine. I fixed the file associations...two years ago? Back when I first installed Hero Lab on this machine.

The systems I'm using in Realm Works aren't supported by Hero Lab, so I hadn't bothered to try it before now.

In any case, I wrote up a bug report yesterday.

Follow up for anyone else using Hero Lab with -dataroot that might end up here: there's no solution at this time. The offered workaround is to make a junction point from "C:\ProgramData\Hero Lab" to where you're keeping your data, but I don't want to do that.

It's not an issue for me yet, as I don't currently use Hero Lab with Realm Works, but it would be nice to have it working in the future without using Windows file system tricks.

@Parody: Unfortunately, this is a special case that we didn't account for. Both the RW and HL teams talked at length about how to solve this. One solution was to spend multiple days on the HL side to support this one case. The other solution was to spend multiple weeks on the RW side right now to properly expose a bunch of stuff we've got designed into the backend. But that stuff is a comparatively low priority relative to all the other things we're focusing on with RW right now (and the survey results reinforce that prioritization).

You're the only person who has run into this issue so far, and only a tiny percentage of HL users utilize the "-dataroot" option, so it's unlikely there will be many others who encounter it. Consequently, we have to weigh the "needs of the many" against the "needs of the few" on this issue.

We came up with a clean and straightforward solution that could be employed to work around this limitation. I'm sorry that you're choosing not to leverage that solution, but we couldn't come up with a better way to resolve this right now.

I don't mind it being low priority; I understand that most people don't move the data folder and the HL integration is a RW feature I'm not using. I just wanted to make sure the response I received was here in case people search for it.

FWIW, I don't consider making junction points to be a clean workaround, especially when there's a documented command line option.

Parody said:

FWIW, I don't consider making junction points to be a clean workaround, especially when there's a documented command line option.

Click to expand...

The issue is that there's no way to configure RW to pass in that command line option, and there's no way to configure that in HL other than via the command line. So there's a documented option for ProductX, but there's no way to control that option from ProductY. That's an issue BETWEEN the products, not within either product individually.

Because that HL option is so rarely used, we overlooked it in our work on the integration. Hence the situation where RW has no way of controlling it.

We have a bunch of logic in the backend that supports configuring those sorts of things, and it all operates in a generalized way that will work for any other products users might want to integrate. However, there's a lot of work involved to expose all of it within the UI.