sentry0

HERO is both a roll low and roll high system at the same time.  My new players were pointing out that it's a little weird to do both.
 
It doesn't bother me and probably the vast majority of users on these boards but it was honest feedback from fresh eyes.

I think Chimpions just started a new season.  

I think Chimpions just started a new season.  

I have been working on some fundamental changes to how characters are managed by the app based on the anticipated future needs of the app.  These changes revolve around how characters are loaded and stored by the application.  The way characters are managed by the app is changing in order to support loading multiple characters into the app and other features like "Notes" and freeform "Equipment" entries.
 
To understand the changes I think it's necessary to describe how character management currently works:
The app can manage one character as time by picking it from the filesystem Loading a new character will erase any data about the currently loaded character like combat state Information about the currently loaded character is saved between sessions via platform specific data stores All the above means is that the app can only effectively manage one character at a time.
 
The next major release of the app will have the new model of character management, which is:
Importing a character will save them locally to the app You will have a list of characters that you may choose to load from You may delete characters as well Character state is saved in the local version of the character Basically, combat state and if you have the "Include Secondary Characteristics?" switch flipped Loading a character will also load their saved state into the app, if any Loading a new version of the character via the import button will overwrite the old character Here's a screenshot of the new character management screen:
 

 

I have been working on some fundamental changes to how characters are managed by the app based on the anticipated future needs of the app.  These changes revolve around how characters are loaded and stored by the application.  The way characters are managed by the app is changing in order to support loading multiple characters into the app and other features like "Notes" and freeform "Equipment" entries.
 
To understand the changes I think it's necessary to describe how character management currently works:
The app can manage one character as time by picking it from the filesystem Loading a new character will erase any data about the currently loaded character like combat state Information about the currently loaded character is saved between sessions via platform specific data stores All the above means is that the app can only effectively manage one character at a time.
 
The next major release of the app will have the new model of character management, which is:
Importing a character will save them locally to the app You will have a list of characters that you may choose to load from You may delete characters as well Character state is saved in the local version of the character Basically, combat state and if you have the "Include Secondary Characteristics?" switch flipped Loading a character will also load their saved state into the app, if any Loading a new version of the character via the import button will overwrite the old character Here's a screenshot of the new character management screen:
 

 

You can choose not to play any sounds at all in the app by going to the settings screen and flipping a switch.  It was the first thing I thought of when Doc requested this feature 😂
 
All of the audio files add up to about 1.1m of bloat in the app.  That's roughly a 10% increase in size on the Android side... not too bad.  The PDFs I used to distribute with the app took up about the same space.  Actual runtime memory should be low too because I load sounds on demand and not all at once.
 
But yes, no one needs this feature but it's a nice little option for people to use if they want.
 
Also, I need something to keep me busy while I wait for the poll to finish 😉

Sounds
I finished the first pass at adding in sound effects... here's how it works right now:
You need to select a "Special Effect" for a power in HD The power must have a roll associated with it like a Blast or Entangle Sounds will play when you make your roll Each special effect in HD has a sound in the app... all 48 of them You can choose to not play any sounds in the newly redesigned settings screen of the app.  Alternatively, you may also choose to just use the dice rolling sound regardless of the SFX assigned to the powers.
 
All the sounds are here if you're curious. 
 
What I'm thinking for phase 2 of this feature is this:
I'll add a screen to upload a sound (and delete one too) You will pick from a dropdown on this screen what SFX it should play on When loading a SFX the app will first check the list of user uploaded files and load anything it finds for the SFX All SFX sounds are loaded on demand (and then cached) to keep memory under control Failing to find any user defined mp3's for a given SFX will cause the app to use the default SFX sound Tablet Support
While we're talking about features, I want to discuss what I mean by 'Tablet Support' as it is currently ahead in the poll.  I will be using a technique to scale up the UI to a reasonable size based on the device screen size and resolution - that's it.  I have no plans right now to make special screens based on the size of the device.  Making screens based on device size adds a level of complexity to my development process that I just don't need right now, especially when weighed against the other feature requests I have in the pipeline.  To reiterate, it will look better on bigger devices but there won't be a changes to the UI beyond the addition of scaling.
 
Perhaps this will change someday but for now I want to add in this first step and move on to other features.

Sounds
I finished the first pass at adding in sound effects... here's how it works right now:
You need to select a "Special Effect" for a power in HD The power must have a roll associated with it like a Blast or Entangle Sounds will play when you make your roll Each special effect in HD has a sound in the app... all 48 of them You can choose to not play any sounds in the newly redesigned settings screen of the app.  Alternatively, you may also choose to just use the dice rolling sound regardless of the SFX assigned to the powers.
 
All the sounds are here if you're curious. 
 
What I'm thinking for phase 2 of this feature is this:
I'll add a screen to upload a sound (and delete one too) You will pick from a dropdown on this screen what SFX it should play on When loading a SFX the app will first check the list of user uploaded files and load anything it finds for the SFX All SFX sounds are loaded on demand (and then cached) to keep memory under control Failing to find any user defined mp3's for a given SFX will cause the app to use the default SFX sound Tablet Support
While we're talking about features, I want to discuss what I mean by 'Tablet Support' as it is currently ahead in the poll.  I will be using a technique to scale up the UI to a reasonable size based on the device screen size and resolution - that's it.  I have no plans right now to make special screens based on the size of the device.  Making screens based on device size adds a level of complexity to my development process that I just don't need right now, especially when weighed against the other feature requests I have in the pipeline.  To reiterate, it will look better on bigger devices but there won't be a changes to the UI beyond the addition of scaling.
 
Perhaps this will change someday but for now I want to add in this first step and move on to other features.

You are absolutely right that people are fussy.  I have the hardcoded version complete from the coding perspective, I just have a few more sounds to pick out.
 
I'll look into the ability to upload custom sounds and see how much work that will be.

If you haven't done it yet there is an option in HD to not print Advantages/Limitations on MPs and lists items.  It will still print on the root element, just not the children.
 
Very helpful at times.

Here you go @Doc Democracy... took about 30 minutes to setup
 
Need to pick out sounds for SFX now...  that'll take longer than the coding lol.
 
 
 

Here you go @Doc Democracy... took about 30 minutes to setup
 
Need to pick out sounds for SFX now...  that'll take longer than the coding lol.
 
 
 

That actually wouldn't be a huge deal to implement... it would mostly be a question of finding public domain sound effects and getting them to play on a roll... there should be a way to stop the app from playing them too. 
 
There would be one more permission required by the app too but that shouldn't be a big deal.

I just pushed the 1.3.5 build to the app stores.  
 
Note: Clear your caches (under settings) before you use the build
 
Patch notes:
Added in a new tool called the "Effect" roller which replaces the "Free Form" tool Effect results now show a message regarding the effect such as the number of segments a target is flashed for Pressing a phase bubble will highlight it in gold to indicate the phase has been spent Long pressing a phase bubble highlights it on red which indicates the phase has been aborted or lost due to stunning Added Dexterity and Speed to the phases section of the combat screen Added the defenses section to the combat screen which lists PD, ED, Power, and Mental defense Fixed an issue with tabs not immediately updating when toggling the "Show Secondary Characteristics?" button Fixed a bug with custom martial maneuvers which caused a crash Complications now display more useful information as a glance You will probably start seeing the build on your devices later tonight would be my guess.

I've been sequestered in my home because of a snowstorm for the past day and a bit... the good news is there's plenty of time to program .  I've been squashing bugs and writing new features with the occasional break to shovel my driveway and watch The Witcher.
 
There's a couple of new things to go through...
 
The Effect Screen
I have replaced the "Free Form" rolling tool with a new tool called the "Effect" roller.  This screen still allows you to roll dice "free form" style but you may also now pick the effect you're rolling for.  When you hit the "Roll" button you will be taken to the "Result" screen per usual but there will now be an informative message.  For example; if you pick "Flash" as your effect type you will see the number of segments that target is flashed for when you press the "Roll" button.
 
In addition to using this tool stand alone I added in intelligence to the rolls you make from the Hero Designer character viewer.  When you roll for your "Flash" power effect it will automatically roll for you and tell you the segments your target is flashed for simply by pressing the die code on the power. 
 
Here it is:

 
Complications
I decided that the "Complications" tab on the Hero Designer character viewer needed a bit of love so it could fall in line with the ther tabs.  The primary issue I had with this tab was that it didn't tell you useful information at a glance.  It listed the type of Complication but no other useful information was present.  I changed it so there's more useful information available at a glance now.
 

 
Defenses
I finally got around to adding in a defenses section to the "Combat" tab of the Hero Designer character tab.  I won't bore you with the implementation details other than to say there's too many ways to get defenses in this game
 

 
That's all for now... I may push a build out later today or tonight depending on how things go.

By the way 1.3.4 works with my iPad.  Very impressive!

I worked a bit more on the combat screen today for Hero Designer characters... here's a screenshot (apologies for the quality)
 

 
As you can see, the Dexterity and Speed of the loaded character are now displayed below the phase bubbles.
 
The phase bubbles themselves are now interactable:
Touching a bubble will highlight it in gold to indicate the phase has been spent Long touching the bubble will highlight it in red to indicate the phase has been lost due to aborting or being stunned  

I worked a bit more on the combat screen today for Hero Designer characters... here's a screenshot (apologies for the quality)
 

 
As you can see, the Dexterity and Speed of the loaded character are now displayed below the phase bubbles.
 
The phase bubbles themselves are now interactable:
Touching a bubble will highlight it in gold to indicate the phase has been spent Long touching the bubble will highlight it in red to indicate the phase has been lost due to aborting or being stunned  

I personally think this sounds more like a standard Trigger advantage with the trigger being a critical hit.

It reminds me of Pathfinder where you would threaten a critical and have to confirm it with a second roll.  Sounds interesting, you'll have to let us know how it works out for you.

I personally think this sounds more like a standard Trigger advantage with the trigger being a critical hit.

The HERO System Mobile app is now officially an open source project under the Apache 2.0 license. 
 
I have decided to put this project into the public domain primarily because I want to ensure the code will be available for anyone to do with it what they want.  I have always been a bit of an FOSS fanboy at heart and in practice and want to offer the project up as such.  I don't make money off this project and I have no plans to charge for the app, so there is little point in keeping the code to myself.
 
Get the code here - https://github.com/sentry0/hero-system-mobile.  The code is reasonably clean and hopefully understandable but there's always room for improvement.
 
For people who are interested in contributing, feel free to grab the code, write your feature, and submit a PR.  I'm happy to help out and get your environment up and running, answer design decision choices, and offer any general assistance I can.  
 
Tinkerers welcome   

In what is becoming a theme for my mornings I have pushed another build to the app stores .  The 1.3.3 build fixes some issues with loading multiple characters in succession and adds support for custom skills, talents, and perks.
 
Patch notes:
Fixed an issue with Cramming Added in support for custom skills, perks, and talents Fixed a number of issues relating to stale data when loading one or more characters into the app in succession Skill Levels now show more useful information at a glance More work to clean up how modifiers are calculating and displaying  The new build should be hitting your devices today or tomorrow depending on how fast it progresses through the various app store QA processes.

I have just released the 1.3.0 build to the Android, iOS, and Amazon app stores so it should be hitting your devices soon.
 
What's new?
You can now import 6th edition characters directly from Hero Designer files Completely restyled the application Two bullet points don't do justice to the amount of effort involved so I'll expand on those points a bit.
 
New Look & Feel
I updated the app to have a more modern look and feel... it's now a dark themed app.  Instead of trying to describe the app, here's a couple of screenshots of the new app.  Note that the second and third images are from the Hero Designer character viewer and not the XML export character viewer.
 
          
 
Loading Hero Designer Characters
This feature was a major undertaking and took months of part time development to get working.  Instead of using the XML export template to export your character from Hero Designer and then loading that file into the app you can now just load a Hero Designer character directly.  This is currently only available for 6th edition characters, I'm still deciding if I'm going to support 5th edition characters.  You can still load your 5th or 6th edition characters via the export template method.
 
Reading in Hero Designer files means that I now have a much greater ability to get granular details out of the file.  This new way of dealing with character data meant that I needed to build a new UI in order to show it and write code to process the data properly.
 
Bug Hunt
During the process of writing this update I managed to get some reported bugs fixed and even found some new ones while I was in there.
 
I'm usually pretty optimistic in general but I'm 100% certain that bugs with the new character viewer that I haven't come across.  Writing this basically doubled the amount of commits I made to the codebase... I pretty much touched every file and wrote a large amount of code in order to support reading Hero Designer files. 
 
Keep the bug reports coming via the usual methods:
DM me via this site;
Email me at phil.guinchard@gmail.com;
Post in this thread.
 
Use The Source
Source code for the app is now open source under the Apache 2.0 license.  You can find the project here - https://github.com/sentry0/hero-system-mobile... do with it what you will.
 
Thank You
I wanted to extend a special thank you to all the people who signed up for the beta and reported bugs.  Your help was crucial in getting this out the door.

The HERO System Mobile app is now officially an open source project under the Apache 2.0 license. 
 
I have decided to put this project into the public domain primarily because I want to ensure the code will be available for anyone to do with it what they want.  I have always been a bit of an FOSS fanboy at heart and in practice and want to offer the project up as such.  I don't make money off this project and I have no plans to charge for the app, so there is little point in keeping the code to myself.
 
Get the code here - https://github.com/sentry0/hero-system-mobile.  The code is reasonably clean and hopefully understandable but there's always room for improvement.
 
For people who are interested in contributing, feel free to grab the code, write your feature, and submit a PR.  I'm happy to help out and get your environment up and running, answer design decision choices, and offer any general assistance I can.  
 
Tinkerers welcome