Hero Lab V3.6 Released

[rob]

I have HL installed on multiple machines (licenses for each one, don't worry - I'm legal ), and one of them is my wife's netbook. We have 3.6 running on the thing just fine (XP Home SP3), but have the problem that in certain tabs (such as wizard), even if it is obvious that the data continues below the bottom of the screen, there is no way to move lower.

This is an issue we just recognized a couple days ago. Hero Lab is designed for use on an 800x600 display - or larger. Some netbooks have a lower vertical resolution, which means some material may be cut off at the bottom. In a few cases, this makes some material inaccessible. We've got this on our todo list to address, and we've revised a few tabs to mitigate the problem as best we can, but it's a definite issue right now.

In installing, we noticed the Choose Form reference as one of the things fixed. Is this a choice in the menu, or an automatic thing? If it is in the menu bar, then where is it?

I don't understand what you're referring to here. If this is an issue specific to a particular game system, please post it in the appropriate forum so that the proper folks will see it and respond to it. Otherwise, please clarify what you're referring to and we'll do our best to get you an answer.

 

[westcpw]

Hi all

I have a problem related to custom classes. Once the update was done, I had several issues with batch file missing and orphaned things, but I managed to fix all of this by testing and recompiling everything

now though, my new classes load fine in Hero Lab but do not show a tab for the class at all, yet all specials etc load....

?

Any ideas

 

[Mathias]

Go ahead and email the files to me - my email address is my user name here, @wolflair.com. There's probably some messed up information, I'll see if I can identify it.

 

[hylentor]

This is an issue we just recognized a couple days ago. Hero Lab is designed for use on an 800x600 display - or larger. Some netbooks have a lower vertical resolution, which means some material may be cut off at the bottom. In a few cases, this makes some material inaccessible. We've got this on our todo list to address, and we've revised a few tabs to mitigate the problem as best we can, but it's a definite issue right now.

If it helps out at all, I have a 600 pixel vertical display on my netbook and I still have some of the info cut off on the tabs (In pathfinder, the "basics" tab cuts off right below "fort save") Maybe I just missed something on display issues, but I checked twice

 

[Kinsfire]

I don't understand what you're referring to here. If this is an issue specific to a particular game system, please post it in the appropriate forum so that the proper folks will see it and respond to it. Otherwise, please clarify what you're referring to and we'll do our best to get you an answer.

It was in reference to what I'll quote below. I'm snipping everything except the most important parts.

V3.6 Highlights

• Choose Form improvements - the choose form now loads faster, shows more items on larger screens, and can hide options the hero does not qualify for.

That's what I meant when I asked about Choose Form - it looks like it's simply background work for YOU guys, but I want to make sure I'm not missing something that I should be worrying about.

 

[rob]

If it helps out at all, I have a 600 pixel vertical display on my netbook and I still have some of the info cut off on the tabs (In pathfinder, the "basics" tab cuts off right below "fort save") Maybe I just missed something on display issues, but I checked twice

Er, Pathfinder doesn't have a "Basics" tab. Oh, wait a minute. You're referring to the summary panels. Now I understand.

FYI, when we talk about "tabs", we're referring to the content in the editable region on the left for the contents are controlled by the tabs across the tab.

Summary panels are a different animal, and it's quite likely that we've overlooked this type of behavior on more than one summary panel across all the game systems. We'll have to look into this.

 

[rob]

That's what I meant when I asked about Choose Form - it looks like it's simply background work for YOU guys, but I want to make sure I'm not missing something that I should be worrying about.

Ah, now I understand. You are correct. This is something that simply happens automatically. The benefits of the change are important to users, so we flagged then in the list, but there's nothing that you have to actually do to leverage those benefits.

 

[hylentor]

yeah, summary panels, sorry - wasn't paying enough attention to my typing.

 

[Tom B]

I tried to install the 3.6 update to my Win7x64 desktop last night.

I clicked on the 'Herolab 2.6' link, and it said it was unable to write to my disk. It said to make sure there was sufficient space and that it wasn't restricted, or something to that effect. I have over 500 Gb free, and there are no restrictions. Any thoughts?

 

[rob]

There are a number of things that could be going on here, all depending on important details that you didn't include in your post. I'll take my best guess, but you'll need to provide more details for us to zero in on the exact problem if this doesn't solve things for you.

I'm 99% certain that there IS an important restriction on your computer. I'm going to assume that you are NOT running with Administrator privileges. If you had those privileges enabled, then this problem almost certainly would not have arisen. You should be able to solve the problem by simply right-clicking on the link to the Hero Lab installer and selecting "Run as Administrator".

So why did this occur? One possibility is that you changed the name of the download. The download includes the word "install". This text in the filename enables Windows 7 to automatically recognize it as an installer and execute it with Administrator privileges. If you delete that text from the filename, all the automatic recognition smarts is unable to operate.

Another possible reason is that you installed Hero Lab beneath the Program Files folder instead of in the default folder presented. When you installed the product, Windows would automatically do it with Administrator privileges (as described above). However, all subsequent launches of the product will NOT have those privileges. This results in all sorts of problems. The only way to reasonably solve this is to make sure you always launch Hero Lab with Administrator privileges. You can launch Hero Lab using the technique I outlined above. You can configure Hero Lab to always launch with Adminsitrator privileges by right-clicking on the icon and selecting Properties. On the Compatability tab, check the Run as Adminsitrator box and save the change.

 

[Tom B]

Right clicking and selecting "Run As Administrator" did indeed work. I'm relatively new to Windows 7, and was not aware that I was doing anything other than as an administrator. Is there anyway to set that as a default? I'm not aware that I set up any other type of accounts...

In any case, thanks!

 

[Maidhc O Casain]

Not sure about W7, but in older versions you can indeed set this as the default - but you have to do it for each program separately.

Right click on the .exe file that runs the program, go to the compatibility tab and it's toward the bottom (at least in XP/Vista).

 

[rob]

Right clicking and selecting "Run As Administrator" did indeed work. I'm relatively new to Windows 7, and was not aware that I was doing anything other than as an administrator. Is there anyway to set that as a default? I'm not aware that I set up any other type of accounts...

In any case, thanks!

I'm glad that got things sorted out for you. If you want to set the Administrator behavior for a single program, you can do as I outlined at the end of my post above. However, it sounds like you want to switch to Administrator mode for your account as a whole. Doing so affords you with greater flexibility in some ways, but it also imposes greater responsibility on the user, since some of the safeguards built into Windows are lost if you run in Administrator mode all the time. So it's a trade-off that should be considered before making the change.

When you create a new user account, you decide whether the account has Administrator privileges or not. You can go back and change this for an existing non-Administrator account, but there can be annoying ramifications in doing so. The problem stems from the fact that Windows does special handling and "pretends" certain files live in one place when they actually live somewhere else for non-Administrator accounts. Once you switch this behavior, these files will no longer be where you (or your programs) think they are. This can cause all sorts of confusion.

You'll find details on this issue in the thread below. The thread is for our Army Builder product, but the behaviors with Windows are identical for Hero Lab.
http://forums.wolflair.com/showpost.php?p=36515&postcount=15

If you want to change the behavior of the user account, then I recommend you either create a new account for this purpose or plan to re-install Hero Lab from scratch after the change. You may also need to re-install other programs as well, depending on whether they are impacted by this issue.

Hope this helps....