Good job!
However, I don’t see how making Faerie Dragon stronger than Rust Dragon could help balance 
However, I don't see how making Faerie Dragon stronger than Rust Dragon could help balance :PWell, HotA team should probably be asked about it 
marif, OK, will take a look on it in a few days. I wanted to create such mod but never got to actually doing this. Thanks, will include it in HotA soon 
Not yet.
I’ll try to look into Town screen corrections, but probably not this weekend. Kuririn’s mod has a few bugs and crashes VCMI altogether as far as I checked…
Ok, I did it 
I made all HotA Town Screen corrections into a mod (attached below) and (hopefully) polished and tested it. New creature backgrounds are implemented as a part of the mod as well. I aligned some of the buildings as some of their areas are different. Sample screens for Conflux (most altered town), Inferno and Tower are below as well.
Everything should work fine but… well, it doesn’t 
While modding I encountered some problems. I am not sure if I am doing something wrong or mods are conflicting with one another (I don’t think they are, but…) or maybe it is the problem of modding functionality itself… The problems are:
If I have both the mods for Town corrections and HotA creature changes (the previous one I made) enabled, it seems that at least some of the changes in creatures do not work. Lets take Firebird/Phoenix for example. At first The Town corrections mod did not alter anything but horde growth for The Vault of Ashes. Rest of the creature modifications from HotA are in the other mod. When Conflux was fully expanded I noticed that Phoenix growth is 7 (2 Basic + 2 Castle + 2 grail + 1 Vault of Ashes) instead of 4 with the mod (1 Basic + 1 Castle + 1 grail + 1 Vault of Ashes). The changes to the price from Creature changes mod did not work as well (gold increased from 2000 to 3000).
When I disable Town corrections mod, HotA creature changes kick in and lower the basic growth and increase the price as it should. I thought that maybe one mod overwrites the other. But that is not consistent with another fact. The changes to Firebird from hota give him fire resistance of 50% instead of full immunity. I did add this ability, but it seems that not the Firerbird has both of them (screen), so nothing is overwritten. Is this a bug? I do not see how to disable full fire immunity via a mod and add lower. 
Anyway… at this point I just added “growth” to Town corrections as well so at least this works but I have no clue what is wrong
It would be good I thing if one of you guys takes a look at that…
You cna disable ability with the following formula:
"abilityName" : nullThat’s just why every ability is named 
Thanks Warmonger
I would appreciate if you or Ivan added the line under Firebird abilities section (I don’t think that reuploading the whole mod just for this is a good idead since it is not published yet 
):
"immuneToFire" : nullOn the other hand, I reuploaded the whole Town corrections mod mod below again (I fixed one or two small issues - I think that is easier than to instruct what to fix). I hope everything is fine now…
There is something else wrong i noticed. When I try to change:
"guildWindow": "conflux/town/TPMAGEEL.bmp",the graphics are misaligned by 1-2 pixels to the right. I edited it and moved 1 pixel to the left (much better), but there are still light borders visible. I also forgot to mention before - I noticed that something is wrong with building borders as well. The extracted ones from ‘HotA.lod’ for new buildings are misaligned by 1-2 pixels to the right like above. I edited them so that they look ok in VCMI. A bug connected with the one above?? Anyway, the mod below has edited both mage guild window and building borders.
HotA Town Corrections.zip (5.42 MB)
I downloaded the newest version of HotA mod from the launcher and noticed some bugs, so I fixed some little things.
Changes:
Switched images of Astra and Casmetra. This isn’t really a bug, but merely a mistake in “lore”.
How did this mistake come to happen? Was the entire HotA mod remade from scratch?
Changed Astra’s specialty image from frost bolt to cure, which is her specialty.
I extracted that image from the original HotA def, and it usually puts out .bmp files, so I just set the extension to .png when extracting, though I noticed that the size may change if you just open in paint, save and close.
After building the first upgrade for the pirate dwelling, the 2nd upgrade doesn’t have its picture shown in town hall screen, which also gives out this error while hovering over any building image:
GetImage error: Request for frame not present in CAnimation! File name: HOTA/TOWNHALL Group: 0 Frame: 46I didn’t know how to really fix this other than using a .json file with the same name as the .def used for graphics, and that was actually used in the old cove mod version, just redirecting the frame 46 to the proper frame in the def file. This is the text:
{ "frame" : 46, "file" : "hota/townhall.def:21"}What is making me wonder here is does the building id actually represent the number of the frame in the archive(def) and does it always have to be like that if that’s true?
What’s the difference between hero specialty “tooltip” and “description”? On the wiki, it says that tooltip is visible on clicking and that it supports using {} for making yellow text, and “\n” for line breaks. I also saw “\r” in mods, what’s that one supposed to mean? It says that the description is actually visible when hovering over specialty icon, so where would that text appear? In the bottom of the screen? Instead of that, only description is visible when clicking and tooltips don’t work at all. Is this a known bug?
I don’t know does the Sea Dogs’ ability works the same as death stare, will it be possible to add a new ability with new graphics? Or just graphics, if the ability is the same?
I wanted to ask why are there no images for creature abilities, like for example this picture
http://forum.vcmi.eu/files/bonuses_985.png
HotA creature changes and town corrections have not yet been uploaded in the repository?
I’m checking if there’s anything else that may be wrong, but I probably won’t find anything new. I will probably post the link to the entire HotA mod with changes soon then, even though I only changed the cove submod, so could i maybe upload just that?
EDIT:
Here’s the cove submod: dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/88897131/Cove.zip
It’s right. Building ID corresponds to frame in town hall icons.
It’s something with your installation. These icons are shipped in “vcmi” mod. If you build VCMI from sources, these pictures are not included into sources, as i remember.
Some of those icons come with VCMI itself but majority are from WoG. So if you don’t have WoG enabled you won’t have icons.
In the current version of the Cove town submod Corsairs cannot be upgraded to Sea Dogs. In addition the graphics for Gunpowder Warehouse is black.
@tkamin, I mentioned that in my post and fixed that, it’s just that it’s not uploaded yet, I hope it will.
Sorry for delay, will do an update today.
UPD:
marif, I have nothing against your mod but I not sure if it is a good idea to include it in HotA because it mostly consists from edited H3 graphics (unlike rest of HotA).
So I’d rather keep it separate, at least for now.
On tooltip & description: don’t know. Both of these texts are present in H3 text but I’m not sure where each of them is used. If you can recheck H3/VCMI behaviour and report any mismatches then I can fix them.
On \r\n: H3 uses “\r\n” to indicate end-of-line (Windows-style end-of-line) , VCMI uses only “\n” (unix-style end-of-line). Both can be used by VCMI so “\r\n” is not a bug or anything like that.
Which one? The castles mod or the creature corrections? AFAIK to some degree both have reused graphics. I thought, that while HotA mod will be gradually updated, all of its changes will be imported, so that ultimately it will be like a complete expansion rewritten specifically for VCMI.
But, ok, whatever Not being offended or anything, but if not, then what? A second separate HotA mod including only graphic fixes? This does not sound like an elegant solution (at least for me) and I think that there will be a demand for this anyway
Cheers!
But there was only one mod attached to your post? UPD: nevermind, found it on previous page.
What I’m OK with in main mod:
- completely redone creatures like pikeman/orcs;
- any mechanics/stats changes & balancing.
Not sure. Perhaps separately installable submod? Of course to do that I would have to finish missing bits in Launcher.
In any event - I’d like to have this second part separate from main mod. How this would be visible in Launcher UI - not sure. Possible options:
- Submod that must be installed separately.
- Submod that will be installed automatically but by default - disabled.
- Separate mod with some indication in main mod? Don’t like this one much.
I think any of these options should be viable by next release but for now I’d rather leave HotA mod as it.
(will upload HotA update in a minute)
Well, I did those mods with a view that they will eventually be submods in HotA. How would they work? If there are some doubts, however, then I would also agree that one of the two points would be the best choice (I personally opt for the #2 more):
That’s my problem how to make it work with Launcher.
Currently I’m leaning to #1 due to size of graphical mod (already half of main HotA package) and because I’d like to have optional translations organized in the same way (submod that must be installed separately).
Still, we have a few months till next VCMI update - plenty of time to decide how to use this mods and in elegant way.
No to mention that there are more graphics not yet implemented (fixed objects, new objects etc.) and Forge on the way. And I hope eventually new movies and campaigns will be supported as well HotA is ~150MB large ATM…
Option #1 seems a reasonable solution considering that VCMI is still a long way from completion anyway
I’ve been reading this thread earlier, but I don’t quite understand what are these mods Marif made that you’re talking about and why should they be implemented with HotA? Are they only from HotA? HotA has balancing changes and graphical changes, like castles, but also some animated and fixed adventure map sprites as far as I remember? I know it has changed graphics of some creatures, or in some cases, “fixed” graphics, like the fire elemental, but I’m not really sure what is fixed there.
To say it simple, those are partial changes from HotA ecompassing only castle changes and creature changes (graphics/balancing). Everything you mentioned is virtually in those mods.
There are still many things to be done and with time everything should be implemented (correct me if I am wrong)…
I have somewhere the link to changelog from HotA. If I don’t forget I will paste it here. You can check on page 3 of this thread what I did in creature mod