Hero Lab beta

Hi everyone,

We've been working on a new version of Hero Lab with some performance improvements, specifically the following:

• When used with certain characters, such as Shadowrun 5th edition characters with lots of vehicles, Hero Lab now applies changes you make up to 10% more quickly, reducing the “delay” you see after changing something on the character. Unchecking the checkbox beside vehicles on the Shadowrun Vehicle tab now makes Hero Lab respond even faster – a Drone Rigger with all vehicles unchecked now takes only half as long to update after changes, for example.
• Memory usage for characters is now much lower – a few megabytes lower for a single character, up to dozens of megabytes lower for a portfolio with multiple characters or a character with multiple minions. This is not a huge benefit on Windows and the Mac, but should greatly improve stability in Hero Lab for iPad, especially on older iPads like the iPad 2.

Before we put these in a general release, we'd like to get some additional testing time in on these, in case there are lingering bugs that we missed. If you have time to take these betas for a test drive, we'd appreciate it!

The Mac beta also includes the following change: Full screen mode is disabled on El Capitan due to bugs in the new OS. We’re investigating solutions for these bugs and will restore full screen mode as soon as we can. Sorry!

You can download the betas here:

(Beta is done - thanks everyone!)

Please post in this thread, or report to technical support, if you run into any problems with the betas. (If you email support, make sure that you note you're using the beta.)

Thanks for your help!

During my game testing this night I kept track of my PC's performance. I noticed about a 15-20MB less use of memory on my level 8 character with hardly anything special. I must admit I am really happy to see that such an improvement came through.

So far I haven't noticed any issues. Even the activation process seemed to be faster to me then with the previous version. I will keep using this for a longer period of time and will be sure to report back if I notice anything.

Found an interesting bug. "Test Now!" in the beta version will not add "New" Things. In example I created a new Adjustment in an existing .user file. No matter how many times I did "Test Now!" my new adjustment would NOT appear. I finally did a "CTRL-R" and boom my new adjustment shows.

I then repeated this by duplicating the Adjustment adding adding "22" to the end to give a new name/unique id. I then tried "Test Now!" again and again nothing. The new "22" Adjustment will NOT show up in HL to actually use until I do a "CTRL-R".

I assume this is a bug as that is major change to how HL works.

Update:
after messing a bit more with the entire scenario I found that after loading/opening a specific section (lets take the adjustments for example)will make the test now stop working for that section.

new portfolio -> look at adjustments -> try to make new adjustment in the editor: will not work
new portfolio -> make new adjustment in the editor -> look at adjustments: will work

After you looked at the adjustments and try to add a new archetype it will still work for the archetypes. However if you had the archetypes list open before the test now it won't.

This is the case with both existing and new .user files

Original post:
Hmm I did a little more testing on Shadows remark. It seems this is only the case when trying to adjust an existing user file. When I created a new blank one it worked just fine. (Only tested this myself under adjustment seeing that is where shadow was encountering it)

still doing some more testing to see in what scenario's this occurs specifically.

Thanks for reporting this, and thanks for the detailed bug report, Togainu! (We're caching some lists to save time, and we forgot to invalidate them when you splice in new things via "test now"). We'll likely do another beta with a fix for this soon.

This is probably part of the same issue (the caching of the list) but when you select a knowledge or another "optional" skill it doesn't remove it from the selection list and can be taken several times because of it. Re-opening the portfolio updates the list. (the reverse is also true: open portfolio -> look at skill list -> remove a knowledge -> the removed knowledge won't be there)

Update:
this is also true for feats
this is also true for traits
this is also true for drawbacks
this is also true for spontaneous caster list

archetypes seem to be working correctly
the class features (such as the warpriests blessings) I tried seem to be working correctly

Thanks, that was another variation of the same problem. This will be fixed in the next beta / release.

Well after using this beta build for a longer period of time currently I can't say that I encountered any (obvious) bugs past the ones we reported earlier. That said I haven't been past the millions of builds possible of course.

No bugs to report with my usage!

I have had no issues with this version, I was having problems with HL decommissioning every time there was a patch but that issue has not happened since I changed to this new version.

I want to thank Colen McAlister, as he personally sent me an email to let me know there is a fix in this patch for the reactivate issue I was having.

All the staff I have communicated with have represented Lone Wolf Development fantastically.