Hello everyone! 2020 is just starting and this seems like a good time to post some updates here. Since HF Workshop has released, the Chinese community, led by 不饿白帝BEBD, has been working on modifying things and making new mods, you can find them in the Projects forum. There are many custom characters and even backgrounds! Unfortunately, tutorials have not been published yet and making custom moves seems to be challenging (though possible).
I take this opportunity to publish here the awesome animation made by a Chinese fan, 谷草籽 (Coal_gu). It is a present for our beloved Marti Wong to celebrate the new year.
(Artwork by Henry The Archer)
10 years ago today, on 31st July 2009, the first version of Hero Fighter was released. Since then, many good things have happened. The game has evolved and an Android version was released. However, bad things have happened too.
Chinese hackers have disrespected the game by unlocking premium accounts for everybody, thus making the game's PC/web version unsustainable. They were also behind the downfall of the referral code system in HFX by flooding the server, as they yet again sought to unlock everything and kill the game's sustainability. Ztage's forum (aka. LF2 official forum) and HF Empire v1 have also been wiped out. After years of abandonment, hackers took over their outdated software and they had to be deleted.
Moreover, to those who don't know, Hong Kong—Marti's birth place—is currently suffering a series of conflicts with China. For all these reasons, Marti has moved to Australia and is currently working at Google in order to make a living, leaving him little time to work on Hero Fighter at the moment. As such, the game has suffered great periods of abandonment.
But let's not wither! The community has fought back and is not dead yet! HF Empire v2 was born, many public rooms were brought back (and better than ever!), HF Origins manga was created, as well as many awesome HF artwork! HF Story Editing also became a thing.
But now... to celebrate this day, I bring to you two new presents...
HF v0.7+ and HF Data Changing.
Happy playing!
Hero Fighter Empire has changed host and moved to a new address which is shorter and easier to remember and type. It also has an SSL certificate now (it uses the HTTPS protocol) which makes it more secure to register and login. The old address was: herofighter-empire.com
In short, back in 2009, Razen started the Hero Fighter Empire project. However, due to lack of time and interest in Hero Fighter, HFE v1.0 was left abandoned for years until the software got outdated, hacked, and the website got totally wiped out. In 2014 I took over HFE's administration and built everything from scratch—while Razen was still hosting the site. I decided it was time to take this burden out of Razen's shoulders and take responsibility for the project entirely.
Until next time! 
Hero Fighter Story Editor is a program that is used to make custom stages that can be downloaded and played by everyone. The game's stages are written in XML format, which is a format that the HF code can parse and interpret. It works similarly to LF2 Data Changing for those who know about it. You will be able to download XML stage files and generate the custom stages. The editor will let you save the custom stage as an XML file (so you can continue working on it later) and will generate an EXE file that will replace the story in the original game with the stage you made. The editor is still very basic but does the core job.
Download: https://mega.nz/#!fN9lFbhQ!Xvl9x2xzGj7niuUkGRaCyb4n5CrkhMRQLm__0JAOZsU
More info: https://hf-empire.com/forum/showthread.php?tid=242
Has some of you may have noticed, a few European public rooms are up for quite a while now, since about the beginning of 2017. You can see the HF Room List here. How was this accomplished and why does it matter?
For those who are not contextualised, in the beginning of HF v0.7 and previous versions, there were plenty of public rooms worldwide. So, mostly everyone could play network mode by simply joining a public room and meeting other players online.
The delay, or lag, in game play was dependent on the distance and network stability between the players and the room. So, one of the problems with the public rooms dwells in the lag caused by the players who live far away from the Room Server location, and who will inevitably join it, as there may not be any closer Room Server to their location. For this reason, the more servers worldwide the better. And also for this reason there are rooms with and without latency limit for joining.