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Hero Lab on Android

Fuzzy said:
I was in no way trying to get Hero Lab to sync to the cloud, I see no point in that. My intentions were to have the ability to view and manipulate profiles via a web server running within hero lab on a PC. As described, this is not porting anything over to anything else, it is effectively rendering the same data to a different target. Then, you could have a single PC/laptop running HL, with profiles for all party members, and each member could use their portable device, regardless of OS, to connect to it and not just display the data, but manipulate it as well (at least the ability to add/set adjustments and conditions).
Click to expand...
If that is all you want then its already available. The app your looking for is "Splashtop" and runs on all tablet OS. It lets you take control of your desktop remotely and would allow you full access to any program including Hero Lab.

Its what I used before the iOS app and it worked great. I heard splashtop is even free on Droids. My players even still use it for leveling their characters and stuff at a game because they no longer bring their laptops. My brother uses it on his droid phone all the time to do "test builds" while at work on a construction site.
 
I have used splashtop for it (have used it often like your brother at work), the problem being the single-user nature of it. It if could actually interact with the data directly, then multiple users could interact with the same instance, allowing all the characters to be in a single profile. This would allow full use of the tactical console.

The other option here is if there was a auto-save, auto-load feature. If, whenever a portfolio was altered, it created a live save file. this, combined with an added ability to open up multiple profiles at a time, and you'd be able to have the GM have all player portfolios open plus the NPC portfolio. The Players, in there own instance of HL, could have just their own character's portfolio open (including their player, plus any cohorts/familiars/etc that they control). If whenever a change is made on one instance, the live save is updated, then the other instances would see the file status update, and reopen. This would provide a 'shared' experience, and not add a lot to the actual product, code wise. This biggest thing would be some way to open more than one portfolio at a time. Simply monitoring a file for changes is very simple, even in 'old code'.
 
Fuzzy said:
I was in no way trying to get Hero Lab to sync to the cloud, I see no point in that. My intentions were to have the ability to view and manipulate profiles via a web server running within hero lab on a PC. As described, this is not porting anything over to anything else, it is effectively rendering the same data to a different target. Then, you could have a single PC/laptop running HL, with profiles for all party members, and each member could use their portable device, regardless of OS, to connect to it and not just display the data, but manipulate it as well (at least the ability to add/set adjustments and conditions).
Click to expand...

Ah! That's an entirely different kettle of fish. :)

We don't have any specific plans for this feature right now, but we have something planned for later this year that could be the first steps towards something like this. Hopefully we'll be able to share more in the upcoming months!
 
Colen said:
Ah! That's an entirely different kettle of fish. :)

We don't have any specific plans for this feature right now, but we have something planned for later this year that could be the first steps towards something like this. Hopefully we'll be able to share more in the upcoming months!
Click to expand...

Honestly, the best option (at least in my view) is not so much the web page view, but some sort of API (XML Service perhaps) that could access and manipulate the same options that can be done from the UI. I can imagine the power this could provide to a VTT, by being able to link directly to Hero Lab's highly evolved math, scripting and rules library.
 
Just came here to vouch for an Android Pathfinder sheet app, my DND grp have been craving for it. We're not in the US and unlike the US, I tend to see Android tablets more often..
 
+1 for Android!

+5 for the 5 people in my grp now working with pnp or RDP!

Even and Android HL Sheet App only, anytime soon would bring a world of convenience! Wish you would finetune the iPad sheetapp, build the Android/MS sheetapp, build the entire HL suite for iPad, etc, etc..

Why is there no similar sheet app for Windows? The iPad version can deal with the extended packages, while the 'demo' can't do that.
 
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In my frustration over this i have started working on an android app that will let me view my character(s) on my android tablet with out having to save a pdf of the character sheet.

I won't make any promises on functionality or eta at this stage, but I do have a working implementation to open the portfolio inside and get access to the characters inside it, I'm currently working on an interface to pick a character and display a character sheet for it.

I'm not planning on a massive amount of functionality in this app (so please don't expect much more then what i have listed above) since I have no intention of trying to work out how wolflair stores there data outside of the portfolio files, but with a but of luck this might provide a bit of a stop gap for us android users until we get a true herolab for android.

I will keep you posted with updates and hopefully I will have something to show people in the coming weeks but no promises on that one.
 
Philderbeast said:
In my frustration over this i have started working on an android app that will let me view my character(s) on my android tablet with out having to save a pdf of the character sheet.

I won't make any promises on functionality or eta at this stage, but I do have a working implementation to open the portfolio inside and get access to the characters inside it, I'm currently working on an interface to pick a character and display a character sheet for it.

I'm not planning on a massive amount of functionality in this app (so please don't expect much more then what i have listed above) since I have no intention of trying to work out how wolflair stores there data outside of the portfolio files, but with a but of luck this might provide a bit of a stop gap for us android users until we get a true herolab for android.

I will keep you posted with updates and hopefully I will have something to show people in the coming weeks but no promises on that one.
Click to expand...

The problem with doing this, as far as I can tell, is the portfolio information just has the picks, it doesn't include the calculated results. For that, you need to process all the scripts. That's a LOT of work, and is likely the major part of the hero lab code.
 
Fuzzy said:
The problem with doing this, as far as I can tell, is the portfolio information just has the picks, it doesn't include the calculated results. For that, you need to process all the scripts. That's a LOT of work, and is likely the major part of the hero lab code.
Click to expand...

If Philderbeast is basing the tool on Hero Lab's saved portfolio format, we actually include the calculated results in an XML file with each saved portfolio, which would be ideal for using in some sort of character sheet viewer. You can check the "Reading Hero Lab saved portfolios" section of the manual for more information. :)
 
yea I'm not attempting to do all the calculations, but I found out early on about the XML that Colen mentioned and that's what I'm currently working on.

it limits the features I can add, but its also making it possible to have something compete in the near future.
 
leleyx said:
Another +1 for the Android app request. I play in 2 groups, 12 players between both, among those 5 android tablets (all Google Nexus) and only 1 ipad. Even if you count mobiles I think there's 2 iphones everyone else has an android phone.

Not sure about paying for it, which I may do, but I'm really foaming at the mouth for the character handler, as I only really need full functionality when I'm running a game, when I'm playing in one all I need is a better way to handle my character sheet.
Click to expand...

Note the bolded text here. And it shows out in numbers. IOS app developers are far more likely to get paid than Android developers so one can understand the greater incentive to develop for the former. By the way, since everyone is throwing anecdotes around I was with a PFS group at the Brooklyn Strategist day before yesterday. I was the lone Android user there, the GM was using an iPad for his reference materials and one of the players and both his two sons each had iPads, all running Herolab.
 
Looking forward to more on Colen's cryptic API comment to Fuzzy back in May and Philderbeast's progress on a display-only view. Both are very nice steps forward!
 
Colen said:
If Philderbeast is basing the tool on Hero Lab's saved portfolio format, we actually include the calculated results in an XML file with each saved portfolio, which would be ideal for using in some sort of character sheet viewer. You can check the "Reading Hero Lab saved portfolios" section of the manual for more information. :)
Click to expand...

Does this mean that Lone Wolf are happy for somebody else to develop a reader for the XML? The reason I ask is because on one of the reviews for:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.dysfunctional.apps.pcgencharactersheetlite

The developer has replied with Hero Lab support not too far away.

It looks like it just reads the character sheet from the xml and makes an interactive character sheet so it would still mean we need to level up on hero lab on the desktop, but could use it on our android tablets.

Might even convince some android users who have been contemplating buying Hero Lab, to finally buy it!
 
ledeir said:
Thanks for pointing this app out. I'll be watching them. (since I don't have enough time to make my own app)
Click to expand...

I emailed the developer about it through the address on the Google Play store, and he said reading the Hero Lab .xml files is going well, but as he only does it in his spare time it's not quite ready (apparently he didn't like the current android character sheet apps so made his own and its gone from there). Apparently there as some bits in the xml that don't explicitly fill in all the necessary information, but there should be enough there to derive everything so he just wants to pace himself and make sure he gets it right.

I said about issues with reading Hero Labs files and he said that the manual (which I have checked) says (under Reading Hero Lab Saved Portfolios):

An XML statblock is different from a text or HTML statblock because it's intended to be read by software, not by humans. Parsing an XML statblock with an XML parser will return a structured document describing the character in a way that's very easy to navigate with a program. This allows you to write a tool that pulls out information from the statblock, without having to parse the text or HTML from a file whose format may change without warning.

This does kind of suggest that Lone Wolf are happy for users to read the .xml, and as he is planning to include the functionality in the free Lite version, that he is not charging for Hero Labs work and that if there is an issue they are free to contact him.

Finally he said the bits he's managed to do so far are (taken from his email):

Character stats/saves/armor class etc...
Feats/Traits/Abilities - TODO: Special Attacks/Animal Tricks
Items
Weapons - About 50% done


So it's looking good so far!

I've downloaded the app and played around with the demo sheet, and if he can get the Hero Lab import sorted, I will definitely be taking this to my sessions.
 
Yes, we fully support others using the XML from the saved portfolios for purposes like this. The only requirement we have is that they properly acknowledge their use of Hero Lab, including appropriate use of the product logo and legal text attributions. Doing this is FREE, so it's just a matter of proper attribution. If anyone has questions about what this entails, please contact us for details. It's quite easy.
 
liz said:
Going to jump in here. Our current answer to "When is Android coming?" or "When is [other system supported in Hero Lab] coming?": We'll be looking at creating a Hero Lab app for other game systems and other platforms once the full Hero Lab app is out for iPad.
Click to expand...

This, this is why *I* am super excited about todays announcement that they are releasing the iPad version on the Apple store.
No way I am gonna buy an iPad just for my character sheet, even a cheap first gen one. Much rather spend the money on Hero Lab Packs :p but I am sick of lugging my laptop to game, or printing out a new character sheet every week (or worse, multiple to cover various different combat situations like raging / not raging).
 
Given the market is currently 4 to 1 in favour over Android vs iOS and the trend is away from iOS, I wonder about the logic of supporting iOS over Android. The decision may have made sense a couple of years back, in all likelihood it probably did. But times have changed and Android is owning the table/phone space.

But as a wise man one observed "It is difficult to make predictions, especially about the future." Who said it first and the actual words used is up for debate (it seems), but you get my point :-)
 
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