I remind much info on commanders and stack experience is in text files in lods, including descriptions. There also some hardcoded text/int tables in exe file on every feature (for example building exact positins are in simple table in exe file on known position so it would ease town feature if said early enough).

Uhm, which, where, what do you want to do?

1. Stack experience file is already parsed.
2. Some commander texts are not used yet, others don’t fit teh window.
3. Check config/buildings.json. The less hardcoded info, the better.

Yeah of course less hardcoded is better if applicable but I meant these settings could be ripped from simple integer table instead searching proper values for each one (you did a tool specifically for it while it could be just copy-pasted).
Once you don’t refer code but only data direct ripping is nothing bad (of course you are free to make it more readable format). I suggest talking with guys from ERA if you believe there’s some table and you prefer not to recover it step by step.
Also knowing adresses of such data you could make UN:C codes reffering to it be proxied to actual ingame data structure which be even more easy if you organise the data almost same way in memory (the format of new config files doesn’t matter once result of parsing is enough similair).
Once you proxy most of data tables you would be compatible with most of the scripts not considered to be portable which is fair achievment (but still it is sometimes easier to port the script - accent on sometimes).

No direct memory access in scripts. Never.

End of offtopic.

I just wanted for mention two things

1. many info is in txt files and most of other can be acquired easily from tables already in h3wog.exe
2. direct memory editing could be “simulated” which would not directly edit memory (it would access VCMI tables/vectors) but would be compatible with existing UN:C scripts which access those adresses from WoG/TE which are mapped to table-like data structures in VCMI, and implementation of this feature would be easier if structures are more similair (not mentioned we could make special mapper function/classes just to wrap from table-like interface to high level ones used in vcmi)

(2) was indeed offtopic, sorry, but more important to say was (1) and that Reverse Engineers from ERA could find the info for you so you won’t need to guesstimate the values searched, because you would instantly get exact ones - for example you wouldn’t need use (and probably write) tool “wpasowywacz”, because all data it collected was actually in table in h3wog.exe/Heroes3.exe which could be just read from there - so next time just ask people at ERA/WoG if they can find info for you which would be easier. All descriptions of stack experience features already are in text file but oddly sorted and I seen you recreated some of it for config file for bonus handler - which I answered mostly to and the connecting thing is stack experience mechanism.

I’ll try next time be more ontopic and do not do too much tangents.

I just learned that commander windows are in 32-bit format, which is still not correctly handled by recoloring function.

So here’s fixed archive with new commander button.
CreatureWindow.rar (740 KB)

@Warmonger / Fishkebab: was it GiMP or Photoshop used for the creature/commander windows? If GiMP, could I have the .xcf files used, which still have all the layers & objects separable within? I want to try some adjustments and it would save me a great deal of time.

Also, can anyone confirm which fonts VCMI/H3 is using? Looks like Times New Roman, but if I use it in GiMP it looks quite ugly as compared to the game.

[size=67]Intro (you can skip): Back in February 2011, I wanted to start working on the Extended Creature Card, but didn’t manage in the end. The past year and a half I didn’t have much time for VCMI (moved house, endless renovations, long periods without internet or even electricity, so computer was often resting in box). So I had to prioritize bug hunting for each release the few times I had time for it. Meanwhile I see Warmonger had to step in and do the job. I feel a bit bad, as with his coding skills he could have focused on other elements while I could have done this. But now I finally have some time, and I’d like to help polishing the Creature & Commander Cards.[/size]

I’m posting the below because I think the Creature & Commander Cards could benefit from some extra polishing, and I had some time to work on some proposals. The items that drove me to this were:
[size=92]- Check button: TMK, in ALL H3+WoG interfaces, this button is always at the bottom, mostly bottom-right, rarely bottom-center. The new position is then not intuitive at all. I’ve been playing VCMI for more than 10 hours the past week, and my mouse still goes to the wrong side of the window to close it. Not only because 10 hrs of VCMI couldn’t erase in my brain 10 years of H3/WoG, but also because all other interfaces in-game continue to have the Check button at the bottom.

• Confusing Rank information. What does “Trained [2]” mean for player who didn’t use this WoG script much? What is 5440?
• Missing vital Rank information. That is “Maximum New Recruits to keep Rank”. Without it, a wrong click in the split/merge screen can be painful, causing your stack to fall in Ranks, losing important skills like powerful spells or Speed points. If you didn’t recently saved, it’s frustrating. If you’re in Multiplayer - no way back.
• Another very useful Rank info would be experience needed for next Rank. Without it, the 5440 has almost no value, unless you play with the manual next to you (not many do that).
• Missing “Check Upgraded Creature Bonuses”. A very useful button/function IMO (at least I use it quite often).
• Alignment issues: Creature Name box not aligned with the boxes below, Check button slightly overlapping an active spell box and some others less obvious
• Creature Basic Skills boxes extended a bit too much, I guess for the sake of filling the space, but now values are a bit too far (“Speed___________________5”)
• Too many Active Spells boxes. I know they may come in handy on rare occasions, but for the most of it, we’ll rarely have more than 3-4. But see my solution below, on how we could have even 14, without taking extra space of the interface
• Blank useless box next to Experience icon (used only for Commanders). I’ll explain later on how that Spell Info can be nicely integrated on Commander’s Card.
• The frames for the Special Skills add extra pixels on the vertical, and the Skill Description box is sometimes just too short to nicely frame a text which is a bit longer. I kept these frames for my first solutions below, in case the others like them, but see also my 3rd proposal below as alternative.[/size]

Please have a look at the below and let me know your thoughts/preferences:
[size=67]- ignore the size (used CreWin4, I know it’s smaller if less skills)

• ignore the fonts (it’s rough GiMP editing to give you an idea)[/size]

Suggestion 1

• Narrowed down Creature Name & Basic Skills boxes to fit on half the screen. Gain of space + nice alignment with Special Skills column below
• Used the gained space for more clear Rank information: 2 is the Rank, Experience & Next Rank At boxes up-right (same as in WoG Commander screen), Max Recruits to keep Rank info.
• Gained space also used to move Hero Head icon next to the artifact
• Restricted Active Spells icons from 10 to 5 and moved up-right. Gain of space + avoid having too many empty boxes on screen
• Used newly gained to reduce interface size to a round 560x500 (i/o 506 IIRC) and have plenty of room at the bottom for the remaining buttons, now including the missing Check Upgrade button, and allowing the Check button to be in the intuitive place again. This area can also be used in-battle as discrete extra space for active spells (see last screenshot).
• (optional) I also removed the word “Skill” for Attack & Defense. I feel it’s redundant, and in this format may cause overlap for Defense if we ever end up having uber-hero/creatures for which the we’ll need more than 6 digits (e.g.: “78(124)”)

Suggestion 2

• Same as above, but moved Check Upgraded Creature Bonuses next to Upgrade button (perhaps more logic/intuitive - not sure)
• Also changed the Check button to the other standard shape. This one is narrower and allows an extra Active Spell box in battle (see below)

Suggestion 3

• Can be applied to either of the above, but using WoG-like Special Skill icons & text, to gain extra space (text can have 2 colors like now in VCMI if more useful, np)
• There’s a gain of space on the vertical this way. That can be used either on top for a title (“Special Skills”), or - as in screenshot - to reduce the max size of the Creature Card to 560x480. This would be good because potentially we may still have one day someone doing a nice port for smartphones, which currently have x480 resolutions (and even if they’ll have higher in the future, the game would hardly be playable on x600 resolution on such tiny screens, so x480 would remain preferable)
• Skills were taken from another creature to give you an idea… but - as a side issue - we can see here some have still too long descriptions, while shorter versions are possible, for example by removing “the stack has” text.

In Battle

• Can be applied to either of the above, with only the upper 5 Active Skills boxes visible by default, even if empty
• However, should the creature end up having over 5 spells active on it, extra boxes could appear at the bottom, which is otherwise empty in-battle (except for the Check button). So we can have up to 8-9 (depending on which Check button we choose) extra boxes, which is even more than the max 10 we have now
• Screenshot based on Check button from Suggestion 2 above, allowing up to 14 Active Spell boxes (if ever needed:):

I do agree that the current 560x-size windows may look too wide, covering most of the battlefield each time we R-click a creature. I could easily restrict it to 70-75% of current width as you suggest. The downside is that we won’t have a great overview of the Secondary Skills for creatures having lots of them. I know they aren’t that many, but who knows what future mods will bring. Maybe I’ll draft a 4th suggestion and post it later. But first I want to gather some initial feedback on the above as starting point.

I also vote for making the Extended Creature Card optional, at least for the main (1.0) release. It’s better as a ‘cool option’ to discover later on, than surprising the player with a mega Creature Card covering all battlefield in the default release, which some might find annoying and complain about. The new option is System Options may not the most intuitive place they would go to look (they’d rather get lost looking for a WoG Options-like button somewhere, or not even have the patience for that, and start “Bring old Creature Card” forum topics or Mantis reports).

.PCX file attached - ready for Suggestions 1 & 2. If I see a preference for #3 or the narrower #4 (will post later), I can easily adjust.
CreWin4_v1+2.7z (64.6 KB)

Did you try clicking the experience icon? All the old info is here, probably could be more. Are the useless info is not on creature screen when stack experience is off.

Not true, every spellcasting creature uses it as well. Spell counter is a very requested feature, to be honest,

Try typing

Health: 1999999999(2000000000)

and see what happens. WoG fan, you say?

• Check Upgraded Creature Bonuses
  Is this really needed? I think that providing way to see bonuses on recruitment screen would be more logical. Or completely remade these bonuses so upgraded creatures will have all bonuses of base creatures + something new.

One more possible feature - multiple upgrades (HotA Pirates or Elves with Gelu in town) or alternative upgrades.
Right now engine supports these features and interface is the only limitation for them - there is no place for an additional button(s) on the interface.
Almost empty row on 1st image can be used for this. But this would need some indication - two “upgrade” buttons without any description won’t look good.

So make them WoG incompatible by design?

Depends on what you mean by “incompatible”.
Providing our own crexpbon.txt where creatures won’t lose bonuses by upgrading won’t break anything - you still can use original .txt if you want to.

“Incompatible” means forcing inheritance on engine level. But removing view of (up|de)grade bonus from interface allowing at the same time to use original crexp config is not good too.

Thanks for the feedback so far. I see there’s still work to do… What do you feel about the rest (skills area, etc), especially about reducing the width at the cost of having less skills visible in one go? Shall we start considering 2 versions of the Creature Window: a fancy large one, and a smaller version, with info more concise (maybe not as cryptic as the Commander codes on the H3 in-battle window, but still…)?

Tried L-/R-Click and nothing (unless I’m missing something). See bugs.vcmi.eu/view.php?id=1140

Didn’t think of it. Good point. I’ll see how it can be added back.

TBH, in like 7 years of WoG, I never got to creatures with over 4-digit Health values. The magic of WoG was that it added enough flexibility for many gamer tastes. Fighting uber monsters was never my thing. But then again, I always had too little time to explore all maps out there… But another good point, I see now there’s reason/use in the wider boxes.

IMO it’s needed. It’s maybe again a matter of playing style, but I use the button quite frequently in my strategic planning for the type of maps I play and I’d find it frustrating if I could only check this in in the recruitment screen. To give just 1 example, for the decision of making the road back home for an upgrade or not.

Remaking bonuses is something else, but some WoG-fans may dislike the idea (the skills unique to base creatures was finally making them more than just an intermediary step to the “better version”). And it would solve the need of the button only partially (you’ll know you don’t lose anything, but not yet what you get, to know if you should plan for the upgrade of creature X or Y first).

Two upgrade buttons wouldn’t look good indeed. Options:

• New graphics, with a “1” and a “2” on the upgrade buttons. But I don’t find it ideal, as you’d still not know for which upgrade you go w/o enough experience or a manual next to you. And comparing your choices would be a real pain if you had to open/close the two windows one by one.
• Perhaps a better approach would be to keep 1 button, but pressing it would open a choice window. Either similar with the Recruit in town, where the upgrade is selected by default, but we can chose the base form as well, or full choice details, with both recruitment costs displayed, to make the comparative choice easier to the player (IMO most practical).

Zamolxis does have a point. Maybe there is way to merge it into other creature stats (attack/defence/shoots)?

Health: 1999999999(2000000000)

Is there any need to show base value especially during battles? In most cases all you need is current value. What about some popup similar to luck\morale boxes that would display all sources of the stat?

1. May be a good idea actually. But button should look like this:

--------------------------------
| [icon with]   "Upgrade to"   |
|   arrows ]  <creature name> |
--------------------------------

Two rows of text may not fit - in this case “Upgrade to” text can be removed.

Cost can be displayed in status bar but comparing stats of upgrade won’t work. Shouldn’t be an issue - usually superior upgrade is obvious (Elves -> Grand -> Sharpshooters) or you can check their stats in town recruitment window.

2. Custom dialog with upgrade options + cost is complicated code-wise (current “show confirmation window” is almost one-liner). Replacing current one with “select upgrade” confirmation window won’t show upgrade cost - bad idea.

As a continuation of this, creature window made without use of H3 graphics:
https://dl.dropbox.com/u/22372764/vcmi/dialog-creature-cc.png
Bakground source: picasaweb.google.com/publicdomai … inTextures
Similar quest window: dl.dropbox.com/u/22372764/vcmi/ … est-cc.png

Main panel:
Creature stats got one more field: remaining mana\spell casts.

Topleft icon: experience. Instead of displaying 3 numbers, icon and text it consist from:
a) Level-dependent icon (1 bronze chevron for lvl1 … 3 gold chevron for lvl 9, gold chevron + star for lvl 10). Icons deserve some improvement but this is all I can do.
b) Subtitle with current experience.
Everything else will be accessible on click (including upgrades preview or max new recruits)
BTW: max new recruits should be part of split screen (by displaying resulting rank) but not here.

Topright icon: artifact. Right click to show info, left click to give artifact to hero.

Bottom icons: luck & morale.

Possible use of free space:

• Label with “Rank X: Name” text, or just “Rank X” - need to check size in-game first.
• Button to pass artifact back to hero
• Print current experience below icon instead of embedding

Spell effects panel:
8 slots for spell effects, Will not be visible outside of battles

Commander panel:
Commander primary skills, only for commander and commander level-up dialogs.

Abilities panel:
Only if creature has any abilities.
Variable size, will be hardcoded to some limit. IMO 3 rows is the best choice.
Description box became narrower but it also became a little higher and can fit one more line of text
Slider to the right will become active when scrolling is needed (black rectangle will be visible always for ease of coding this)

Buttons panel:
Visible only on left click. Consists:
a) Dismiss/Exit buttons
b) “Upgrade unit” text, visible if any upgrades are possible (army in town or hero is upgrade specialist)
c) Upgrade buttons.
Unavailable upgrades (no gold) will be grayscaled and not clickable (or tooltip with required sum)
Ignore empty image - in-game UI won’t have unused buttons

Status bar
Likely will be disabled for popups - no need to waste 20 pixels on it

Black horizontal lines between panels may not look good but are necessary for seamless enabling\disabling of panels.

Any complains\propositions\nitpicking?

Looks very good to me. Layout and separation into subparts is clean.

Some questions:

1. Do I miss sth. or why don’t you used the OH3 upgrade button?
2. Black border near abilities and commander abilities icons are just placeholders aren’t they?
3. Can a creature hold an artifact in OH3 or is it an addition to WoG? I never gave a creature/stack an artifact:)

1. To allow multiple upgrades to different creatures - Elves with Gelu in town, Cove, other mods.
   Another issue is that it has a bit different size compared to nearby exit icon. Result of slightly different layout in H3 where these different sizes were actually a feature.

2. Narrow horizontal lines are for seamless connection between panels. There won’t be separate image for every possible option (Commander, creature in battle, creature outside battle, etc). Instead I want to split this into one image per section and compose final one in runtime.
   Wide vertical black block is for slider (too lazy to draw it - will be placed in runtime)

For example this is what you’ll see when r-clicking a creature outside of battle:
dl.dropbox.com/u/22372764/vcmi/ … battle.png

• No active spells outside of battle
• Not a commander
• R-click so no buttons panel.
  And I forgot to remove status bar

3. That’s WoG. Same for experience.

One thing: Commander can wear up to 6 artifacts.

Also, passing artifact on click may be not intuitive. We can add confirmation window, but it will make that operation slower.

Yeah. I’m thinking of button similar to current “hero head” but with better size so it won’t look out of place. And with “cancel” icon instead - hero head is too complex to draw for me.

Does not looks like “one thing” to me
Window is already quite high (~ 460px for commanders in battle) - I can’t find good place for 6 art slots. Current <> buttons are not very intuitive and don’t show total number of slots.

Those commander skill icons are too big. Smaller 32-44px icons would fix too big window perfectly but I can’t find anything suitable.
Another option is to make this window ~550 pixels in height. Will only affect commanders so shouldn’t cause any major problems.