Hello and Suggestion: Witch's Hut and Battles HOTA style

International board Development
#1

I’m new here, and I just wanted to express my gratitude to the Polish fans and all others for their dedication to keeping this game alive and thriving. As an aging man with a strong passion for everything Might and Magic, it’s truly heartening to witness the fans’ unwavering support for this game.

Throughout my journey, I have thoroughly enjoyed playing HOTA and ERA II WOG, but lately, I’ve been primarily engrossed in VCMI and its extensive collection of mods. While VCMI offers incredible flexibility as a ground-up rebuild, there are a couple of small quality-of-life features from HOTA that I’ve noticed are still missing in VCMI.

One such feature is the ability to opt out of Witch’s Hut skills, which is currently non-optional in VCMI. Additionally, HOTA auto-resolves every battle with the option to manually give it a try afterward, a huge convenience. Although I’m not an expert, I believe VCMI has the potential to incorporate these features due to its flexible nature. Given my background in LUA and Java programming from college, I might even consider developing a mod myself to add these features, assuming I find the time and that’s it is not too time-consuming between modding other games.

If there are no plans to add these features, could anyone explain how I might start doing so myself or point me in the direction of some resources and guides on how to make such mods?

#2

Hi.
I think combat replay is HD Mod feature, not HotA? In any case, option to replay combat manually is already in and will be available in next release (1.3)

Witch hut - planned, but we need to make some changes in engine (c++) to allow moddable witch hut. So not sure when this will happen since we have more important stuff to do at the moment and our team is rather small.

#3

@ Ensrick WitchHut should use Rewardable object, which already fives option to refuse a reward: Modding ~ Objects ~ Rewardable · vcmi/vcmi Wiki · GitHub

#4

Our rewardable object does not yet supports Witch Hut fully.

  • witch hut has property that needs to be loaded from map format (skill). Rewardables can’t.
  • witch hut should display skill in status bar after visiting, including whether current hero has it
  • witch hut needs custom messages for when hero already has skill and for when he has no free slots.

Yes, it should use rewardable, but at the moment this is not possible without new bugs.

#5

I’ve been using the HD Mod with HotA, had no idea HD Mod added that feature, but that’s great news the auto-combat with replay option is planned in the next big release.

As for the plan to allow a moddable witch’s hut, if it’s on the to-do list, that’s all I wanted to hear. In the coming years, I’ll come back to VCMI regularly to get updates.