Exporting from CW, HD.flt loses skills lists

[Tom Carman]

Am I missing something obvious?

Because of Hero Designer's often glacial slowness, I tried to create prefabs in Creation Workshop 1.9.5, export them using the HD.flt filter, then bring them into Hero Designer. The prefabs are a large number of sublists containing skills or "powers" like Enhanced Perception.

It turns out that a sublist in the Powers section in CW translates just fine (I've only done limited testing on this.) But in the Skills section, the sublist is removed just leaving the skills; and any duplicate skills are deleted. So all of the nice neat packages are gone, leaving a laundry list of skills in their place.

[Simon]

If you're seeing "glacial slowness" on HD, it sounds like you're running out of RAM.

What are the specs on your system?
What version of HD are you running?
How much RAM do you have available when you start HD?
Can you post a copy of the file trace.log when HD slows down (it's located in your install directory)?

And, finally (for Gary, who wrote the export template): What version of CW are you running (and what template are you using in it)?

[Tom Carman]

Originally posted by dsimon
If you're seeing "glacial slowness" on HD, it sounds like you're running out of RAM.

What are the specs on your system?
What version of HD are you running?
How much RAM do you have available when you start HD?
Can you post a copy of the file trace.log when HD slows down (it's located in your install directory)?

And, finally (for Gary, who wrote the export template): What version of CW are you running (and what template are you using in it)?
I am using the 1.46 update of HD; I bought it recently so I don't have access to any of the previous ones (and I only just now noticed that 1.47 is up). I installed it on two machines: my desktop for serious work, and my laptop for taking to games. The desktop is an Athlon 2100+ with 512 MB RAM - Hero Designer's performance is not as fast as CW/MC, but certainly acceptable. The laptop is a Thinkpad 600E: Pentium II-400, I think, with 160 MB RAM. Yes, yes, I know, very marginal for running HD. It works, though slow, for building a character, but slows to a crawl when I edit the large Prefab I am building. That's why I tried building the Prefab in CW, which is much much faster on the laptop.

Anyway, I'm more concerned about the disappearing sublists than the program's speed. Initially, I was making sublists in CW Skills and watching them fall apart in HD. Last night, I thought to try it in CW Powers as well, and noticed that those sublists would translate over to HD.

I am using for this project Creation Workshop 1.9.5, and I have Hero Creator 1.9.5, so I have the Hero and Fuzion templates at 1.9.5 level. (I also have Metacreator at or near the newest revision, with the Hero template 2.2.1 update and the next-to-latest Hero5th template. But those are installed in a different subdirectory so they won't interfere with the old 1.9.5, which I figured was the version that your export filter would support best.)

[Simon]

OK...I can accept a large prefab running slowly on the laptop ;-)

I'll defer to Gary for the troubleshooting of the CW/HC export, since he's the one that wrote the template.

[Killer Shrike]

Also, try to make your Prefab into several smaller modular Prefabs. That way you can load and unload them as needed and somewhat manage the memory expenditure manually.