Drooling Fan

[bcholmes]

<p>I just wanted to say that I've been using Hero Designer for about a week, now, and I love it. It has been such a time saver for me.

<p>I particularly like:

<ol>
<li>The ability to create export templates (wow! Just... wow!)
<li>The usefulness of the initial set of export templates.
<li>How well-thought-out the interface is. (all those options have been done in a non-overwhelming way!) Especially with things like Characteristics added as powers.
<li>Above-and-beyond-the-call-of-duty features such as the skin support and notes-on-powers. (And custom adders et al)
<li>That it's written in Java (yeah, I'm a geek. This was the thing that persuaded me to buy the damn thing after Hero Games posted screen shots). It's a little slow on my old, old laptop, but I suspect I know the constraints that are responsible for that.
</ol>

<p>There are one or two things I would have additionally liked to have seen but they're so minor (and probably idiosynchratic) that they probably don't matter in the grand scheme of things:

<p>I've historically created character sheets that listed the "levels" of skills in addition to the roll. Hero Designer clearly thinks in terms of skill levels; I wish I could print those out.

<p>Also, I wish I could specify the Look-and-feel (I've never been terribly fond of the Metal look-and-feel).

<p>Any thoughts or plans for a published API? It'd be nice to be able to create a plug-in for, say, the sector mapping stuff in Star Hero.

[Simon]

Well...first off, glad you like it!

Skill Levels: That's certainly a possibility. As you note, HD already tracks that information, so it's really just a matter of creating an export tag for it....those that want the info on their character sheets can specify the tag in their export template...I'll look into it and let you know.

Look-and-feel: The Metal LNF is just the default. Go to Tools -> Set Skin to change it out. If you've got the time/inclination, you can also create your own LNF....I chose to use the Skin Look and Feel package because it makes it (reasonably) easy for people to create/modify the UI.

Published API: Publishing the API so that folks can write plugins is something that I've been thinking about. It <i>may</i> happen with v2....I'm really not sure at this point. It will probably happen at some point, the timing just depends on how quickly I can clean up the architecture and make it "safe" (and easy) for plugins.