Background Cityscapes

First up are some background items to help set the stage. The new wider viewport makes for a good way to test these mostly long and narrow items. And of course a whole new set, Companions Farm Animals, because why not!

Random Stuff I thought Looked Cool

We had a couple of skulls but the lineart style on these gives them a whole new dimension. Bows and crowns have also been shortchanged so I put in a couple of those.

Here’s a list of all the preferences you can set to tailor your HM3 experience how you like:

Click the gear icon () in the bottom bar to open the Preferences panel. All settings are saved automatically and persist between sessions.

UI Theme: Choose a color scheme for the interface: – Dark — the default dark-background theme – Light — light backgrounds with dark text – HeroMachine 2 — steel blue tones inspired by HeroMachine 2.5 – HM Classic — bronze and olive tones from the original HeroMachine 1

All themes meet WCAG AA contrast standards for accessibility.

Slot Sort Order: Controls how body part slots appear in the dropdown: – Alphabetical — slots listed A–Z (default) – Rendering Order — slots listed back-to-front in the same order they stack on the canvas, so you can work from background to foreground

Canvas Actions: When enabled (default), you can interact directly with items on the canvas: – Drag to move – Shift+drag to scale – Opt+drag to rotate

Turn this off if you prefer using only the Transform tab controls, or to avoid accidentally moving items while browsing.

Show Item Info on Hover: When enabled, hovering over any item on the canvas displays a tooltip showing the item’s name and slot. Helpful for identifying overlapping pieces.

Lock Scale by Default: Controls whether the scale lock (proportional scaling) starts locked or unlocked when working with new items. Default is unlocked.

Current Item Glow: When enabled, the currently selected item on the canvas is highlighted with a colored glow that follows the item’s shape. Helpful for spotting which item is selected when pieces overlap. The glow is automatically hidden during drag operations for performance. Default is off.

Thumbnail Toolbar: Controls when the quick-action toolbar appears on equipped item thumbnails in the item grid: – On Hover — toolbar appears when you hover over an equipped thumbnail (default) – Always On — toolbar is always visible on all equipped thumbnails – Always Off — toolbar is hidden

You can now upload not just saved character strings but old Flash Cookie “.sol” files. For a long while that was the only way to save characters but it was tucked away in a hidden location that was hard to get to. Now if you have one from Back In The Day you can import it like any other file and all of your saved characters will be there, fully editable, without needing Flash at all. The test file I got from a long-time and awesome HeroMachine community member had 375 characters saved, and now they can all live again.

In addition I added an “Export All” button so you can keep your characters in a safe place outside of the site. I dread the thought of clearing your cookies and suddenly all your data is missing.

I’m also adding more new items under a central theme!

There will likely only be around a dozen or so as I’m learning how to use Inkscape instead of Flash but it sets the stage for much more down the road. So if you have any item requests you’ve been wanting, go ahead and send them in, I’ll keep a list.

Thanks again everyone!

Beta testing is under way and so far it looks exceptionally positive. If it continues to go well, we may have something ready for you all to use as early as next week.

The New Hotness

Here’s what’s new in the upcoming HeroMachine 3 “Phoenix Edition”.

Platform

• No Flash required: runs natively in any modern browser, including mobile and tablet
• Future-proof: built on open web standards (SVG, JS) that will never be deprecated
• Faster loading: items fetched on demand and cached, no massive upfront download

New Capabilities

• Shareable URLs: compress your character into a link anyone can open and edit
• Direct canvas manipulation: drag to move, Shift+drag to scale, Alt+drag to
  rotate items right on the canvas
• Intuitive rotation: mouse rotation follows your grab point naturally, like
  spinning a real object
• Keyboard shortcuts: Ctrl+Z undo, Ctrl+Shift+Z redo, Delete to remove, arrow keys to nudge
• Legacy save import: load your original HM3 Flash XML save files into the new app
• Full screen mode: take over the whole screen for a massive canvas — no more tiny fixed window
• Resizable control panel: drag to widen for more thumbnails per row, persists across sessions
• On-canvas text editing: add custom text to your designs with live preview

Improved

• Better color swatches: save to specific slots, persisted across sessions
• Better export: export the current view exactly as you see it, with custom fonts properly embedded
• Smarter item switching: colors and transforms carry forward when swapping items in a slot

We Need New Starters!

If you can still use HM3 in the Flash version (see instructions here), or if you have any old saves you think would work, I’d love to get some new options for “Starter templates”. These are pre-set characters that have all the right Sets loaded to start creating that can be loaded easily and quickly from the Load menu to help new users get started creating quickly.

The categories I’m thinking of (and which are totally open to change so comment below if you have suggestions) are:

Ones We’re Keeping

• Male Fantasy Warrior
• Female Fantasy Warrior

New (pending community feedback)

• Male Fantasy Mage: robes, staff, hat/hood
• Female Fantasy Rogue: hooded, daggers, light armor
• Male Sci-Fi Soldier: tech armor, rifle, helmet
• Female Sci-Fi Officer: spandex/tech top, pistol, visor
• Male Superhero: spandex, cape, mask, boots
• Female Superhero: spandex, cape, mask
• Male Modern/Street: coat, pants, hat
• Monster/Creature: monster body, alien head, claws

We’ll also be trimming some of the less useful existing starters to make room. Submissions should keep in mind these general guidelines:

• SFW: This is still a kid-friendly operation so let’s keep it clean
• Minimal transformations, masks, and glows: These are meant to be beginner-friendly starters more than showcases for the coolness
• No copyright infringement: Some similarities to published characters may be unavoidable due to the limited nature of our human understanding of the universe, but keep them as original as you can
• Submitting: Either paste your save string below in a comment, submit it through the contact form, or email Jeff directly with the save string either as text or in an attached TXT/XML file to afdstudios@gmail.com.

Getting My House In Order & Ready for Friends

In addition to working on the non-Flash app version, I’ve been unmothballing this site to get it ready to actually be used again. It had fallen prey to several rounds of spam bots resulting in – I kid you not – 3.6 million spam users being registered. I’ve at long last got all of that cleaned up and the site is doing much better, running on the latest versions of WordPress and PHP, with extra security in place to hopefully stop that from happening again.

The spams

I had 3.6 million spam user registrations, accumulated over ~6 years, peaking at 25,000+/day in 2022. Each fake account created ~24 wp_usermeta rows, resulting in 87 million rows consuming 16 GB alone. It. Was. Massive. Here’s a summary:

This preserved 945 real users out of 3.6 million.

Cry ‘Havoc’!

But let’s hold off on letting slip the dogs of war. Comments on new posts (younger than 180 days old, which is this one and … yeah, one other) are now open, as are the forums. You don’t (and won’t) have to be registered to use the app, but you will have to be registered to comment or make Forum posts, just like it’s always been.

What’s next?

Hopefully next week you’ll see an announcement here that the HeroMachine 3 page will have the new app in place and available and you can start creating!

Hey all, it’s been a long long time since there was any HeroMachine news of note, and I honestly don’t know if anyone is still around or interested. But I might have some pretty huge news to share in the very near future about getting HM3 working again. I will share that I have a working prototype built in native CSS, HTML, and JavaScript that will run natively in your browser without needing anything in particular extra. And definitely no Flash!
To help with testing, though, I am hoping some of you fine folks are willing to send me your saved character XML files from the past so I can test things further. My email address is afdstudios at gmail dot com.

If you are still here, THANK YOU! And if you can send me some saved character files that would be fantastic, so DOUBLE thank you!

I appreciate you all more than I can say.

– Prodigal Jeff

The Facebook page seems to garner more interest, so perhaps they can find a home there.

I gave it my best shot, but the lack of entries is too disheartening for me to continue

Cheers Machiners

DJuby

It can be a castle, a cottage, or the underside of a bridge
Just have fun with it.
Rules for posts, contests, and challenges:
• Original characters only, no copyrighted characters, no characters based on copyrighted characters, no characters based on RPG’s or other games.
• The characters must be your own design and not based on any character that might be copyrighted in any way.
• Please keep all submissions PG13: full or partial nudity is prohibited.
• I have the right to delete any post that I believe crosses this line without warning.
• Only post characters that have been created solely using Hero Machine, and that you know for certain have never been entered in a contest before. If you aren’t certain, don’t enter it, because I’m not going to go back through all of the contests and check.All entries must be in JPG or PNG (BMPs are too big), posted to a publicly accessible website (like https://www.heromachine.com/forum, Image Shack, Deviant Art or whatever) Do not use Photobucket<.
• Entries must be made as a comment or comments to this post, containing a link directly to the image and the character name.
• No copyrighted characters please – they will be deleted.
• Please make the link go directly to the image (like this) and not to a hosting jump page (like this).
Thia challenge will close at 6 pm on Saturday, JFebruary 1-10. Voting will start then.
Here is what is changing:
• Challenges will start weekly on Sunday at 1pm Eastern
• Challenges will close on Saturday of the same week at 6pm
• After the challenge closes members will vote for a top 3.
• You must assign first, second and third place
• If you vote an entry as First it will receive ten points; a second place finish gets 7 points; third place gets three points.
• The winner each week will receive my version of their entry rendered using HeroMachine 3
• You cannot vote for your own entry
• Voting must be completed by 11am Sunday.
• The winner each week will choose the topic of the next challenge, and cannot enter the challenge .Simply email me your challenge topic to dwjuby@cogeco.ca by 12:30 pm on Sunday.
• Perhaps most importantly, this means that I can enter CDCs again
•