After another two months of development we are happy to issue a next release of VCMI. It doesn’t bring so many features as the previous ones, we have mostly focused on bugfixing.

The most useful new feature is probably the possibility of returning to the main menu without restarting application (via System Options window). We have also added support for a few new town structures and made various minor improvements.

There is a lot of bugfixes - about 80 issues have been resolved. Please check the changelog below and bugtracker for the list.

Check items implementation status for the full information about which map objects, town structures, skills, spells and artifacts are supported.

Download link: forum.vcmi.eu/dload.php?action=download&id=15 (3.5MB, ZIP Archive)

Installation:
Extract the package into your main Heroes folder.
WoG 3.58f is required. We strongly recommend using English version.
If you have older version of VCMI, you have to overwrite it.

Save format has been changed, savegames from previous versions won’t work with 0.75.

VCMI supports 800x600, 1024x600, 1024x768, 1280x960, 1280x1024, 1440x900 and 1600x1200 screen resolutions. To use custom resolution, type (before starting the actual game!) in the console “resolution” and pick appropriate one. Alternatively, you can change default resolution by the editing config/settings.txt file.

Acknowledgements:
Many thanks for all testers and developers who contributed to this build.

For the general information about our project look here. Our project isn’t really playable now, but it gives you an idea of progress we have made so far. We’re hoping that you’ll like it.

Since VCMI 0.74 we have deployed separate bugtracker. Please report bugs using this form. Check this page for list of known bugs and details.

We hope you’ll help us develop the project - details are available here. VCMI is an open source project licensed on GNU GPL 2.0 or higher. Our SVN repository with all the sources is available here.
You can look get help in building and developing VCMI sources in the development board.

CHANGELOG
0.74 -> 0.75 (Dec 01 2009)
GENERAL:

• Implemented “main menu” in-game option.
• Hide the mouse cursor while displaying a popup window.
• Better handling of huge and empty message boxes (still needs more changes)
• Fixed several crashes when exiting.

ADVENTURE INTERFACE:

• Movement cursor shown for unguarded enemy towns.
• Battle cursor shown for guarded enemy garrisons.
• Clicking on the border no longer opens an empty info windows

HERO WINDOW:

• Improved artifact moving. Available slots are higlighted. Moved artifact is bound to mouse cursor.

TOWNS:

• new special town structures supported:

• Academy of Battle Scholars
• Cage of Warlords
• Mana Vortex
• Stables
• Skyship (revealing entire map only)

OBJECTS:

• External dwellings increase town growth
• Right-click info window for castles and garrisons you do not own shows a rough amount of creatures instead of none
• Scholar won’t give unavaliable spells anymore.

A lot of of various bugfixes and improvements:
bugs.vcmi.eu/search.php?project_ … atus_id=-2

Full changelog is available here.

VCMI Team
(still growing!)

first crashbug on mantis for VCMI 0.75! (the 280 on mantis)
i attach here maps to use for testing (tried bug280 on test_defs one)
TestMaps.7z (16.7 KB)

Hellow,I’m newbe here,but still evil fan of the SOD.This project is great.The SOD is a best ever game for me.
I downloaded v0,75 but can’t feet to the screen the aplication(the game).I use Windows 7 and native resolution 1440x900 of my monitor. I changed resolution in settings.txt,but nothing help.
Thanks in advance for any help and sorry for my bad english!

@majaczek: actually the first one was #272 Anyway, so far there are no major crashes, only a couple of cases in particular situations, which could be easily avoided.

@yopen: Welcome to the forum! Regarding your question, do you mean how to enable 1440x900 resolution (for that, you need to type Resolution in the console window, while the application window is in the Main Menu), or do you mean how to get that in full screen (in which case you only need to press F4)? Or if you have some kind of error let us know, maybe we can figure out what’s causing it.

I’m finding that in Windows 7 the VCMI window is taking up a bigger proportion of the screen than in XP. I’m not sure whether it is the size of the fonts or what, but so far I am only able to use the default H3 resolution (800x600) and still see the entire VCMI window. I wonder what’s causing this?

Best regards,
Steven.

Now you make me curious about getting my hands on a W7.

Though it’s strange… Are you saying you have a high resolution screen (1280x or higher), and yet the main window, supposed to be 800x600 is still taking most of the screen?

It is this.

img254.imageshack.us/img254/1576/1920x1200largefontdispl.th.jpg

Only the default size gives the correct size of VCMI window in Windows 7. I had it on the largest size for readability, but in W7 it seems to affect other things too, like certain windows. The strange thing is I have a similar setting in XP and it does not affect the size of the VCMI window on the screen.

Best regards,
Steven.

The latest release of SDL is quite old, so I don’t think it can properly deal with Windows 7. Since I recently switched to Windows 7 and have experience with Windows API I guess I could do something about it

The newest stable release of SDL (1.2.14) is quite new (October 19, 2009 - 22:24) and according to its changelog it’s 100% compatible with Windows 7, so probably we just need to replace the old version we currently use. The only problem with SDL is that it’s generally no longer in development (1.3 branch, which is developed, won’t be released soon).

I hadn’t noticed. For some reason I had the old 2007 SDL DLLs in the Heroes 3 folder, but built with the 1.2.14 ones. But for me the problem is still there even with the latest SDL so it doesn’t look like it’s been fixed. I wasn’t able to deal with it either by resizing the window to appropriate resolution programmatically.
It seems as though Windows 7 upscales everything, including pixel coordinates. It’s not just affecting dialog units.

EDIT: I’ve found a solution, an application that does not want Windows 7 to interfere with DPI upscaling can set itself as DPI aware. It worked for me when I tested with 800x600 and 1280x1024.

EDIT2: I stumbled upon a fix that can be used until next version. Right-click VCMI_client.exe, choose Properties and then under the Compatibility tab you can choose to disable DPI scaling.

I have completed the check of all Mantis reports marked as Resolved in 0.74x or 0.75. Most of them were confirmed as resolved in 0.75 and closed, a few were reopened because they weren’t (fully) fixed. I left the following in Resolved status, without closing (for now):

#132 - The resolution mentions a “quick & dirty fix” for it. Tow, I’m not sure if that means you’d like to come back on this one to “clean” the code.

#178 - I wouldn’t know how to reproduce the situation of receiving Titan’s Lightning Bolt from a Scholar (no way to force it from MapEditor). If anyone has an idea, please share.

#261 - This was not reproducible on my machine in 0.74x either (I was getting a crash, but different). I almost closed it anyhow, but perhaps Steven could first double check on his machine if it’s indeed not reproducible anymore.

All other 0.74x reports in Resolved but not Closed, are so because they have been fixed after the 0.75 release. So I’ll wait for the next release to check them.

Just a few questions to ask:

• Is there any plans for a new release at 1st February?

• It looks that printing original game fonts is already supported and even used in some places. So maybe it’s time to make full support in-game? (as alternative to .ttf, left some config value to select fonts type)
  Original fonts fits heroes much better and this will remove all that bugs with not fitting text.

• While working on kingdom overview window I’ve added possibility to make it bigger\smaller for new resolutions. I’d wish to add it to a configs (7z-ped graphics is less then 50 kb in size so this shouldn’t increase size too much) but don’t know what config is most recent. The one from “new resolution” thread or something else?

I had very little time that month but I’ve just passed my exams and I’ll have practically whole February free.
Therefore next release will be postponed to the March 1st.

On the other hand, I’d like to make a dev release soon within several days.

Absolutely. Original fonts are fully handled and I think it should gradually replace current TTF fonts.
Possibility of choosing between different fonts is interesting but

1. There may be problem with positioning - TTF and OH3 fonts have slightly different sizes, so coordinates may need to be adjusted.
2. TTF fonts fit worse and are less readable. I don’t see good reasons to using them if we can have original fonts.

However some simple selection mechanism (match original fonts and H3 ones into pairs and use appropriate depending on config file) shouldn’t be too troublesome to implement.

AFAIK the most recent is here: [forum.vcmi.eu/t/new-resolutions/227/16)

But Zamolxis knows best

^ That is indeed the most recent link, where by the way I just updated that attachment because in the original archive there was a redundant file (AdvMap1.pcx). So if you downloaded the package already, just trash that file.

@Tow: Glad to hear you have passed all your exams. Hope everything went fine as well for TowDragon and the other devs who had exams this month. Looking forward for a more active month on the VCMI front in February then.

@Zamolxis

I’ve passed all my exams too (getting highest possible grades ). Now I return to work on VCMI (I’ve already fixed a few bugs in battles).

Thanks for answers.
I’ll replace ttf with original fonts for next release unless someone do this before me:)

I’ve made config for overview window but forum does not allow attachments >256 kb and archive is… 257 kb size.
I probably need to find some auto-generation. This images are just too similar:)
Uploading only changed config.txt + additional graphics.
OverviewConfig.7z (51.7 KB)

How will the use of the original fonts work with unicode? Fall back to TTF when a character can’t be found?

^Not sure about this one, I’m getting warning that not entire config was parsed. Both for it and SVN version.

Also, new resolutions are missing (such as 1366x768).

So it’s 1366?

I was actually waiting for an answer from you on this in the New Resolutions thread, because Blake created it, but for a 1336x resolution (as per your post). And I was doubting it, because I haven’t heard of it (I knew about 1366x), but who knows - I didn’t want to change it, just in case you really have a desktop with a more rare resolution.

As for integrating it in the main package, I discussed once with Tow that we’d like to keep the main kit as small as possible. That means we’d like to keep in it only the most popular resolutions, and I think the rest should be separately downloadable. As I see 1366x768 got only 2 votes so far (4 others got more votes, and are not yet integrated), I’m not sure we should include it in the main release. For me the next candidate would be the next resolution that gathers 10 votes in that thread.

1366x768 is pretty standard in modern laptops. And I’m using this once as it’s much faster than my old PC, especially since MVS has awesome multicore support.

Anyway, I see no reason not to include the config since these few lines of text take pretty much no place, neither cause any inconveniences.