Unfortunately most of gamers really don’t understand open development models and something like open source it’s just way too complicated. So for now most market of AAA budget games run by marketing bullshit only and same valid for high-end hardware market, all kind of overclocking, etc.
Basically when publishers as Ubisoft re-release old game like HoMM3 they don’t actually target anyone from original audience, but more like new PC gamers and guys who only play on mobile devices. So even if many people who playing H3 all these years think this blurry “HD” graphics bad those new players would likely say it’s better because they used to this style of graphics.
IMHO open source is get big adoption in business and corporate market because people here know how to count money. Sadly games market (except extreme low-budget indie or extremely hardcore titles) is mainly about marketing because game development is costly and even if developers want to actually create good game hardcore audience usually can’t really cover development cost. E.g if you check Kickstarter projects most of them only represent like 25-40% of actual budget at best.
PS: Anyway it’s way too offtopic already, but personally I don’t think like this “HD edition” would be a big thing just because Ubisoft already funded Might & Magic X: Legacy which get way more press coverage and attention, but end up in being more like “poof”.
I really don’t care about that HD edition (because it’s not even remake, just updated and upscaled graphics.), but hey we can benefit from that. Even if it’s not perfect job, this HD edition is just looking a lot better. 800x600 on fullhd displays is looking awful. It’s not some kind of platform game, Is just not good. If you use resolution mod, everything is too small, it’s not good either.
I hope vcmi will use these updated graphics. It would be amazing.
Oh ok, but if Ubisoft never did an upscaled graphicks, would it still be possible in VCMI? Yeah. I remember the requirements when it was new. Only 32mb ram etc… Little Off-topic: HEROES CHRONICLES: ALL CHAPTERS, is this recommended buying, for those who like Heroes 3?
There are several years passed, and yet no artist started to redraw 3d0 assets to free ones (to possibility of use VCMI without Heroes 3). And you say updated graphics
I think main issue with redrawing something it’s that most of fans like game as it is. It’s not possible to do both: not break original’s copyright and make assets that looks like original one.
Yeah, that’s the first thing I said when I saw the H3HD remake, I didn’t like the necropolis at all, it’s bloody awful! The original one looked really dark and actually was kind of spooky and creepy, but now it’s just like some whitish-gray bricks put together to make a bunch of weird buildings with weird proportions and positions! Some of them I did like, but it’s not many of them, they just got lucky with those, it wasn’t the intention to try to make it look more like that. Somehow, the old heroes 3 had something which many people praise in its graphics - Realism. Many future heroes games, and many games in general couldn’t manage to get that realism that heroes 3 had no matter how good graphics they had, especially early 3D, it looked very goofy.
We actually do have some little graphics edits, I just forgot where they are on the forums, we had some nice things, some of them could really fit and you wouldn’t see the big difference or you would say that it’s better. I think the cape of velocity that was made was pretty good. If I find it later, I’ll post the link here.
Mostly, all of these graphics done in 3D nowadays kind of have a problem of textures. Heroes 3 was made in 3D and it looks as great as it looks! I think that somehow, you could make graphics look better and in high res.
Among the other things that drew my attention are the insane requirements compared to the original! I know that almost everyone has a great computer today that can run this, but if this game really eats that much of your power, that’s not a good thing.
store.steampowered.com/app/297000/
Does VCMI use this much computer power? I only noticed that it does use too much CPU compared to heroes 3, but it’s okay aside from that.
I’m just curious about what could possibly have changed so drastically in the code between the base game and those expansions that they could not either (A) Decompile them to obtain it, or (B) Recode said bits? We’re not talking about different game engines here
There is no evidence yet, that in HMM3 HD they are using source texts for original HMM3. Even 3DO said that sources are lost.
And if UBI has sources and only redrawn graphics, than there is a lot of work to do with source code - all interface and objects coordinates and sizes in pixels are changed. And original 3DO engine worked with 8-bit colours, UBI must use 32-bit colors, so this also needs to be rewritten in program.
The source code for Strife was lost, with the best hope of recovery being one of the former dev saying he might still have it on a disc somewhere in a box in storage on the other side of the continent-wide country. Chocolate Strife was the only realistic choice for a codebase. (The other choices were Vavoom, also under the GPL; and ZDoom, which includes code under non-commercial licenses making using it for a commercial rerelease like SVE a no-go.)
Chocolate Strife’s code is based on the Doom engine source code officially released (Doom itself, and two other games, Heretic and Hexen) as well as on a thorough reverse engineering effort which was made to identify, document, and recreate every single difference between strife.exe and doom.exe. So that code base is a perfect recreation of the original game, including bugs and glitches.
In VCMI’s case:
The source code for Heroes III ROE was still available to the developers, so they did not need to use VCMI.
VCMI is unfinished and deviates from H3 on several points because it’s not based on reverse-engineering decompiled code. Things like AI and random map generation are the most blatant examples of different behavior.
The coordinates aren’t too much of an issue actually. Those things are usually handled by a bunch of defines, you can change the numbers once and be done with it.
Converting from paletted to truecolors is also relatively easy. Render your image to a framebuffer (in paletted mode still), convert that image to truecolor, send the result to the video card. Since we mentioned Strife before, let’s use Chocolate Doom as an example: it works like this too, rendering a palette image, and displaying a truecolor image.
In any case, the rendering engine isn’t the most important part of a game like Heroes III. For a first-person 3D game like Doom, rendering is very important and easy to mess up (projecting 3D geometry has a lot of variables and it’s easy to get a completely different result from the same data); but Heroes is in 2D so it’s much easier to get exactly the same look. There’s no issues of scaling issues, clipping issues, Y-shearing, light diminishing, or inaccuracies resulting in linewiggling.
I’ve started new/game and assets project. You could call that updated graphics. I make it so with intention to support 1920x1080. From my point of view downscaller/upscaller would be nice to have as it would allow me to not make separate assets to support 1366c768 and 1600x800 and 1920x1080. (3 main resolutions today)
Other then that I think VCMI should support HeroesHD assets. Addons do not really add so much to this game as Coflux is a crappy town anyway.
About HD edition … too bad Ubi didn’t change town and battle screens to be 16:9 instead of 4:3 … That is really a pitty.
I’ve briefly looked at new graphics format (with an extraction tool from Hota forums) and it is a mess, it’s hard to find something and asset names all seem to be totally random. Creature anim format is also horrible…
I guess it would be hard to support this in vcmi or rather it would be a lot of work to support this :(.
I prefer just if someone resize HD assets to standart sizes and replace old-school 256-color DEFs by 32-bit PNGs (townscreens at least). But this is lot of work, don’t think someone in near future will make it. And there are legal problems with Ubi Soft (dont think they will legally allow to take graphics files from HD edition). Maybe make some exe-file, that will require licensed HD Edition, and will extract and format HD assets to some VCMI mod.
Unlikely. Currently we have quite a lot of hardcoded positioning in our UI. It may be problematic to use anything with size different from H3
Details? Maybe there is a grain of logic under a mountain of dirt
Macron1, don’t see any point in that. Down-scaling upscaled graphics won’t help much with quality. And as for number of colors - large images like town backgrounds and main menu are already full-color (16-bit IIRC) so converting them to 24-bit won’t give you much in quality
