Authoring Kit Preview #1

[Colen]

Hey everyone! Here's some news you might be interested in.

In a few short weeks, we'll be releasing Hero Lab 3.0, and with it the long-awaited Authoring Kit update. (This will be a free update for all existing Hero Lab users.)

Following in the tradition of Lone Wolf's other products, Army Builder and Card Vault, the Authoring Kit will let you add support for all your favorite role-playing games to Hero Lab. We'll include documentation to guide you through every step of the process, and we'll even be including the core Savage Worlds game system as an example of how it's done! (More details on Savage Worlds next week.)

Until then, we've assembled a preview of what you can do with Hero Lab's Authoring Kit for a game system like the new Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition. Click here to go to our new Authoring Kit page for some preview screenshots!

[flamepulse]

Looking forwad to it. now would you be able yto figure out issues with your liscnesing so i dont have to keep emailing support every time i make changes to my system or update herolab?

[MPHopcroft]

Great news! I've been looking forward to this for a year!

[FifthWanderer]

Awesome!!! Glad to hear it won't be much longer to wait.

[rob]

At 09:49 PM 11/25/2008, you wrote:

Looking forwad to it. now would you be able yto figure out issues with your liscnesing so i dont have to keep emailing support every time i make changes to my system or update herolab?

You should direct your ire towards the great northwest (aka Microsoft). Colen spent many weeks working on a revised mechanism for system detection that was purely hardware-based. Sadly, there are so many bugs in Windows that it's basically impossible to do across all the different versions of Windows.

For example, consider the case where there is a big, glaring comment in Microsoft's source code for Windows that says something along the lines of "Don't forget to check this!". Sadly, they DID forget to check it. The comment is there, but no one ever bothered to write the actual code, which renders the official published method for doing an important operation completely broken on many computers. Yes, this is a true story. We spent many hours working with Microsoft to figure out why something wasn't working, only to have one of their internal developers ultimately admit this to us as the reason why our tests were failing. After multiple go-arounds of this process with different bugs in different ways in different versions of Windows, we finally gave up.

If we were willing to say we're only going to support Vista, then we could probably get away with doing something that would be much improved over the current mechanism. However, we'd also be losing a large portion of our user base by doing that. Since very few users actually run into problems with the way things currently work, and an even smaller number encounter problems on a recurring basis, not many folks are truly impacted by the current mechanism. This is fortunate, because we've been forced to accept that Windows is too bug-ridden to solve the problem effectively across the full breadth of platforms we support. :-(

Sorry for not having good news on this front, but I figure you'd probably rather hear the truth than PR spin. :-)

[FifthWanderer]

Yeah, I can believe that of Windows. I remember reading an interview where a senior MicroShaft employee admitted that there were portions of the then current Windows source code that the programmers had no idea what they did, but that caused Windows to fail massively if they were removed.

Linux FTW!

[krathen]

Believe me, there is still code like that, and there would probably be code like that in Linux if the fact that it wasn't open source so everyone with the inclination could look at it and figure out what it was doing. when it becomes a problem is when you have billions of lines of code and the guy who wrote a particular block of it no longer works for the company, didn't comment what he was doing, so now you have possibly (and most likely) critical code with no information as to how it was constructed what it does, and why it's important.
I actually had something similar happen on a school C++ project, and that was with only about a thousand or so lines of code.

[SAbel]

Hey Guys looks great keep up the hard work, any idea when we can have 4e since it is the preview material ... drooll :shock:

[MPHopcroft]

Originally Posted by FifthWanderer

Yeah, I can believe that of Windows. I remember reading an interview where a senior MicroShaft employee admitted that there were portions of the then current Windows source code that the programmers had no idea what they did, but that caused Windows to fail massively if they were removed.

Sounds like the human appendix and tonsils, only in reverse. Nobody knows what the tonsils do, except become infected.

[krathen]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tonsil they know what tonsil's do they're part of the lymphatic system... appendix however, no one has a clue.