Since everyone chose the day I was out of the office to make big announcements, :) this is coming a bit late -- I'd've posted earlier otherwise. But here's further information to supplement the link previously provided by Derek. You can also visit the new "Hero Designer" forum on the message boards to discuss things and express opinions.
<<< Those of you who have done a lot of work with Hero Creator/Creation
Workshop need not fear -- among the many standards and guidelines we
established for Dan's work, the first and foremost was this: "Hero Designer
must be able to easily import and convert characters from Hero
Creator/Creation Workshop." We know a lot of you have written up hundreds of
characters using HC/CW, and we have no intention of invalidating all that
work.
Several of you have asked about prior management's promise that "when a
5th Edition upgrade for Hero Creator is created, customers who bought Hero
Creator will get a copy of the upgrade for free." We cannot honor that
promise, for several reasons:
We're sorry the situation has worked out this way, but so it must be.
Believe me, we'd love to give all Hero gamers some free software, and game
books, and other goodies. But we simply can't afford to do that (at least not
more than we already do via the Free Stuff and FAQ pages on the website). As
the die-hard fans who've witnessed Hero's struggles over the years to remain
a viable company and publish books, we hope you'll understand and agree with
our stance on this matter.>>>>
I'll try to answer further questions as I may, but I'm spending most of
my time these days editing/developing CHAMPIONS, so it may take a while.
If you have technical questions or suggestions for the program, please
post 'em in the "Hero Designer" forum. Dan Simon monitors that forum, but
he's not on this list, and I'm not likely to have the time to forward a lot
of messages to him. ;)
Steve Long
HERO System Line Developer