Homecoming Hero Designer on macOS

CURRENT STATUS: Codeweavers just released a brand-new Wine interpreter that deals better with 32-bit executables on November 22, 2019. I'm going to experiment with it over the Thanksgiving holiday to see if I can fix the broken macOS Catalina status.

FORMER STATUS: Broken on macOS Catalina because the .Net 4.0 and 4.7 installers are both PE32 executables.  I have not yet figured out a workaround. Only works (more or less) on Mojave. YMMV. You should be running the most recent Island Rum regardless, which shares a dependency upon Brew.

Download the attached "Hero Designer Mac Installer.zip", then extract and run it.

If you're running a recent Mac release, you'll get an error that this is from an "unidentified developer". Open "System Preferences, Security & Privacy, General".  You'll see in the "Allow apps downloaded from" section, "Hero Designer Mac Installer was blocked from opening because it is not from an identified developer".  If you trust me, click "Open Anyway". If you don't trust me, just unzip the file yourself and run the shell script inside of it after carefully reading it to make sure I'm not doing anything stupid or malicious.

Wait a while. You won't see anything happening (unless you're one of the careful people who opened the .app in Terminal and watched the output), then eventually Homecoming Hero Designer will open, and you'll have a "Homecoming Hero Designer" icon on your desktop that you can double-click, drag to Applications, or whatever you want.

Hero Designer Mac Installer.zip

Lots of to-do here. What started as instructions to write your own shell script is morphing into an actual installer...

Hi.

I'm trying to follow these steps but I'm quite MacOS noob.

I'm stuck at step 5. It doesn't recognize the path. My drive is called Macintosh HD. Does it affect anything at all?

Thanks

The "problem" with these instructions is that they're written for people who already know (all) the answer(s).

Having something that "works" for people who don't already know how to use that command set would be helpful.

Of course, the ideal solution would be for all of this to be accessible from the menu of options on the left side of Island Rum that we use to access Homecoming.

Anyone up to doing a Wine Bottled version of Pine's for those of us who don't speak 1337?

Anyone up to doing a Wine Bottled version of Pine's for those of us who don't speak 1337?

And then tell Pine how that works. :p

I can't find it now, but I thought I saw a post where someone said he was working on a web browser character builder.  I wish something would come up.  Being stuck without Mids or similar is really starting to suck.

For those who aren't so technical, I'll fill in some details for the original poster.

First, you're going to want to start the Terminal app.  In my Launchpad, it's in the "Other" folder; on older macs I've had, it was in a folder called Utilities (which was in the Applications folder).

Once that's started up, cut and paste the following commands, one line at a time.  The first one will pause at one point to ask for your password (this is the password you use for your Mac).  There will be lots of messages that scroll by.

usr/bin/ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install)"
brew install wine winetricks
export WINEARCH="win32"
export WINEPREFIX="${HOME}/.wine32"
winetricks dotnet40
cd ${WINEPREFIX}/drive_c/Program\ Files
unzip ~/Downloads/Hero\ Designer.zip

I modified his instructions a bit for myself to add:

cd
echo "#\!/bin/sh" > run_pine.sh
echo export WINEARCH=\"win32\" >> run_pine.sh
echo export WINEPREFIX=\"${HOME}/.wine32\" >> run_pine.sh
echo wine \${WINEPREFIX}/drive_c/Program\ Files/Pine\'s\ Hero\ Designer/Hero\ Designer.exe >> run_pine.sh
chmod +x ./run_pine.sh

Then, when you want to run the hero builder, you should be able to open a terminal window and just type

./run_pine.sh

I basically did the above and it appeared to work for me (at least I got something that looked like the hero builder; I haven't yet started playing around in it).  I can't promise that this doesn't install any malware on your computer or that it will work for you, and I also can't promise I will check the forums with any frequency to answer questions.

Still wishing this kind of functionality could come "built in" with Island Rum ...

The new version of "Homecoming Hero Designer" is kind of painful to install on Wine with the new .Net 4.7.2 requirement. I'm working through bottling it now. Hope to have something to share within a few hours.

The new version of "Homecoming Hero Designer" is kind of painful to install on Wine with the new .Net 4.7.2 requirement. I'm working through bottling it now. Hope to have something to share within a few hours.

Any updates? I'm trying to bottle it too, with very little success. (Winery instead of Winebottler, but.)

EDIT: Tried with winebottler too. Still no dice and I don't know what I'm doing wrong.

I'd tried similar on Linux but had little success.

A web version would be lovely. Especially one that had essentially no backend -- save all state in the link itself.

we put up a .net 2.0 backwards compat release to try to help the mac users, have you guys tried that one? https://github.com/ImaginaryDevelopment/imaginary-hero-designer/releases says net20 in the title

20 minutes ago, Maslow said:

we put up a .net 2.0 backwards compat release to try to help the mac users, have you guys tried that one? https://github.com/ImaginaryDevelopment/imaginary-hero-designer/releases says net20 in the title

Yes.

I see.

You have very cleverly released two files with the exact same name and different file sizes ... leading to one all important question ...

Huh?

What's that?

You say it's OBVIOUS ...?

Oh.

Right.

So it is.

Move along.

Move along.

No ebil mind control software to be seen anywhere near here.

Move along, move along.

We are not ninjas, we are merely a hedge.

Move along, move along ...

Yeah, the Net20_2 works like a charm!  Thanks! Attached is an installer. Pretty rough second draft, but it's all I have time for today...

Download the attached "Hero Designer Mac Installer.zip", then extract and run it.

If you're running a recent Mac release, you'll get an error that this is from an "unidentified developer". Open "System Preferences, Security & Privacy, General".  You'll see in the "Allow apps downloaded from" section, "Hero Designer Mac Installer was blocked from opening because it is not from an identified developer".  If you trust me, click "Open Anyway". If you don't trust me, just unzip the file yourself and run the shell script inside of it after carefully reading it to make sure I'm not doing anything stupid or malicious.

Wait a while. You won't see anything happening (unless you're one of the careful people who opened the .app in Terminal and watched the output), then eventually Homecoming Hero Designer will open, and you'll have a "Homecoming Hero Designer" icon on your desktop that you can double-click, drag to Applications, or whatever you want.

Hero Designer Mac Installer.zip

What this does under the hood:

1. Installs Homebrew, if you don't have it already.

2. Installs Wine and Winetricks to /Users/your_name_here/.wine32

3. Downloads the .Net 2.0 version of Homecoming Hero Designer and extracts it to "/Users/your_name_here/.wine32/drive_c/Program Files/Hero Designer".

4. Writes a .app directory to your Desktop and places a shell script inside of it to launch Homecoming Hero Designer.

To-do: Platypus. Git. "Real" installer with logs & everything. Self-contained bottle instead of ${HOME}/.wine32.

Running the unix installer right now.

In my case, I had to:

1. Extract from the zip file
2. Show Package Contents
3. Open the Hero Designer Mac Installer unix executable file directly from within the package contents in order to get the Terminal window to open
4. Input my password to proceed, since I've got my user account passworded on my home computer

Currently at the step in the Terminal window of Downloading Command Line Tools.

And I've hit another password demand.

And then at the "end?" I was being asked for a password to github ...?

Don't have one of those, denying that request.

And the terminal window claims that it is done now.

On 7/26/2019 at 12:15 AM, TXG Sync said:

3. Downloads the .Net 2.0 version of Homecoming Hero Designer and extracts it to "/Users/your_name_here/.wine32/drive_c/Program Files/Hero Designer".

And this did NOT happen.

Well, the Terminal said it was done ... but nothing USEFUL appeared anywhere ... whether it be on my desktop or anywhere else ...

I won't know until I fix my MBP to test, but aren't Mac PKG files/apps basically just folders that contain the app's files? If so, then wouldn't it just be possible to simply replace the folder containing the main components from the PC builds? IE: Drag'n'drop fix

Yeah looks like if you don’t have Brew installed already this doesn’t work. Gonna get my Mac VM running tomorrow to take another stab at a fresh installer. 

Sorry about that. 

16 hours ago, WanderingAries said:

I won't know until I fix my MBP to test, but aren't Mac PKG files/apps basically just folders that contain the app's files? If so, then wouldn't it just be possible to simply replace the folder containing the main components from the PC builds? IE: Drag'n'drop fix

Yeah, the simplest-possible Mac app is a folder that contains an executable by the same name as the folder. You get into some plist complexity when packaging something more complicated, and clearly I need to make this Mac wrapper for Pine's much more robust!

Working the Gilroy Garlic Festival this weekend, though, so that limits the time I had to play...

Sorry guys. No progress likely on this unless someone else picks it this week, because, well: https://www.cnn.com/2019/07/28/us/gilroy-garlic-festival-shooting/index.html

Yes. My kids and I were right there working the festival. Yes, at least one friend of my high-school-age kids got shot but is expected to recover. No, none of us are injured but there were like ten thousand people there when the shooting started.

Mass shootings suck ass.

Hope to revisit when I have my head on straight.

19 minutes ago, TXG Sync said:

Sorry guys. No progress likely on this unless someone else picks it this week, because, well: https://www.cnn.com/2019/07/28/us/gilroy-garlic-festival-shooting/index.html

 

Yes. My kids and I were right there working the festival. Yes, at least one friend of my high-school-age kids got shot but is expected to recover. No, none of us are injured but there were like ten thousand people there when the shooting started.

 

Mass shootings suck ass.

 

Hope to revisit when I have my head on straight.

Well Fu....this country needs some serious mental health support. Amongst other things. Take your time.

38 minutes ago, TXG Sync said:

Mass shootings suck ass.

An armed society is a polite society.

Uh ... wrong.

An armed society is a PARANOID society, just waiting for Murphy's Law to have some random fool start killing people.

On 7/28/2019 at 8:57 PM, TXG Sync said:

Sorry guys. No progress likely on this unless someone else picks it this week, because, well: https://www.cnn.com/2019/07/28/us/gilroy-garlic-festival-shooting/index.html

 

Yes. My kids and I were right there working the festival. Yes, at least one friend of my high-school-age kids got shot but is expected to recover. No, none of us are injured but there were like ten thousand people there when the shooting started.

 

Mass shootings suck ass.

 

Hope to revisit when I have my head on straight.

My prayers are with you and the community...I know it's trite, but I am really sorry to hear this...

Thank god you are OK!

I just got Pine's running on my Mac with your installer and wanted to say thanks.  Sorry for your troubles with the shooting :-(.

I had to right click the installer and "show package contents", then run it from there.  I ran it twice because the first time it didn't proceed on to installing Pine's after installing Homebrew, but running it a second time fixed that right up.

@TXG Sync, I very much appreciate the effort you've put into this; also, thanks to everyone helping out with the testing and tinkering.

Now that there's a 2.6.0.2 of Hero Designer, what's involved in getting that to run on my Mac?

I will try again with a clean Mac VM this week. Got off sick time and came back from vacation, so I will have some time to try to improve the installer to not need to be run twice, and to use the latest version.