Below you will find a copy of the message I sent to Tow today. Since no response followed, I make this proposition public.
Good day. I am the leader of an enthusiast group devoted to the creation of an RTS game loosely based off the existing M&M lore (we use the GBR engine). So far we got a 2D artist, a 3D artist / modeller, a reverse engineer, a scripter and a concept writer.
The thing is, now we’re done with the basic engine modifications and want to test it in action, but haven’t made any new models yet. (Un)fortunately, most of our staff also share positions in a team engaged into making the Horn of the Abyss unofficial addon for H3:SoD, so our modeller is too busy right now to make models for our Heroes-based RTS.
So we decided to make some sprites based off models from Heroes 5, for there is a method that allows for successful extraction of model animations from that game (though few people seem to have ever cared about that). I don’t know how bad or good will these models look in our tech demo which is mainly about scripts and game mechanics (we actually don’t want any H5 models in the final version of the game, but have to get some sprites for the demo whatever those would be).
When I was fiddling with H5 models, I realized how cool H5 would look if made into a 2D game. Many of us from the df2.ru community forum think H5 was crippled by the introduction of a 3D engine. Instead of neat sprites, we got a lot of low-poly models and a totally drunken camera, let alone the unimpressive city screen graphics sporting blurry textures and angly boxes meant to represent the buildings.
I just thought you VCMI guys could strike an alliance with us to recreate Heroes 5 as a classical 2D game, carrying over all standard H5 skills, rules and game mechanics. You’ve got the source code for VCMI, so you have nothing standing in your way. I guess a 2D remake of H5 could achieve an immense popularity among old-school H3 fans dissapointed with the graphics/style/system requirements of H5 (I’ve got a Q6600 CPU overclocked to 3.2 GHz, 4 Gb of RAM and a GF 8800 Ultra and the game may lag at certain moments if all the settings including AA/AF are maxed out!).
We are going to make a ‘sabotage demo’ of our RTS game featuring a few dozen H5 units rendered as sprites, so we are about to set out on a massive sprite-making spree. Probably this thing will cause a great scandal all across the Web if it’s released all out of the blue and without comments. So we could try and render the same sprites in a classical H3 aspect to see how they are gonna look on VCMI. BTW we’d prefer the ‘Flat H5’ running with 1280x1024 resolution with a palette of 16M colors.
Here’s a couple of pics how Flat H5 could look like (sorry for the crude Photoshop work):
ipicture.ru/Gallery/Viewfull/6924885.html
ipicture.ru/Gallery/Viewfull/6924886.html
P.S. The precedent of the Grove town project for H3 proved that sprites rendered from models and textures used by another game aren’t considered plagiarism juridicially 'cause Blizzard gave no f*ck about their models used as sprites in that project, though they’re perfectly aware of it.