(no subject)

[kingandy]

Boo, the Fábrica de Heróis is suddenly no longer in Bruce Timm style. This makes me like it slightly less.

However, it's still less bloated, better-looking and more tweakable than the old HeroMachine, so...

Comments

[phyrbyrd.livejournal.com]

It only lets me do standard male hero and I can't understand the language...

It's in beta

[nerdcountry.blogspot.com (from livejournal.com)]

I think what he's doing is releasing the first body style as the beta for feedback and testing. Portugese isn't my strong suit, but I get the sense that he's shutting down the old stuff so everyone has to come to the new one, to generate more traffic.

That, or he's auctioning off parakeets for science experiments, I can't tell for sure.

I do like the Bruce Timm style, I thought about doing that with HeroMachine but then the Fabrica came up and it was kind of moot. I have released a couple of new beta versions of client-sponsored apps, though, that have much better art and a slew of new features like moving items around, scaling them, rotating them, coloring the lines, having multiple items in each slot, etc. If you get a chance, check it out and let me know if it's more to your liking.

I'll readily admit that one thing the Fabrica has going for it is the consistent design across all the items thanks to Timm's vast library for reference, but I think I'm slowly getting to the point where I've figured out my own style enough for it to come through consistently.

I should be starting on HM3 in earnest in January some time time, built on the code base of the two minis I just released. Hopefully it'll make for some really customized, fully-tweaked-out characters.

Jeff Hebert
HeroMachine.com

Re: It's in beta

[kingandy]

"I think what he's doing is releasing the first body style as the beta"

Oh definitely - I think the body styles came out over time in the old version too. I only found it in the last week or so myself, but I have this vague notion that the 'child' sizes only came out after that.

FWIW, I have mixed feelings about Fabrica's new level of customisability - that you can now have a freak with wooden legs or rocky arms certainly has its benefits. However it does make it a heck of a lot more fiddly. It really needs some kind of colour scheme option - either the ability to select a single major/minor colour pair and apply that to all segments, à la City of Heroes, or maybe a sort of 'custom palette' area where you can store colours you're using a lot (especially your skin colour, since "skin" has become a slightly more abstract concept now the body section is split up - you can give your arm a non-skin colour and "paint" it with flesh-coloured segments using gloves or shirt outlines).

Re: It's in beta

[(Anonymous)]

From a user experience standpoint, keeping it usable and friendly while also adding features is definitely the big challenge. With my new code base I'm trying to do that by making the "duping" features and such optional. If you don't want to turn them on, it'll work the same way it used to.

I've also added a bunch of customizable colors, where you can store up to I think it's 16 of your own choices, chosen either via the color square or direct hex values.

I also added "Color all Skin" and "Color all Hair" buttons so you can apply your current color settings at once to all skin or all hair items. In 3.0 I probably will add a "color all" button that will do the same thing for every item.

I also added a paint brush feature, where you can copy the current color settings to any item you click on, which I think is handy.