I have some inquiries about this project and was hoping that some of the VCMI team members could shed some light on these questions.
What exactly is the end goal of VCMI? I have heard on the VCMI forums somewhere that VCMI would like to break away from recreating Heroes III and focus on making a whole new game - is this true? Or is the end goal to create Heroes III in a fully moddable engine? I’m quite confused about this.
How faithful to the original game is VCMI? For example, will VCMI be adding new features or will it just be mainly fixing bugs and things like that? I have noticed that some aspects differ from the original Heroes III game such as spells and other things.
If the VCMI team adds new features will these be able to be turned off and on so that the game can be played like vanilla Heroes III? I have nothing against new features, but since I grew up with the vanilla Heroes III, I admit, new features intimidate me a bit lol. Although I would like to install new town mods, spell mods, etc for VCMI.
Will there be a map editor for VCMI and if so will the map editor integrate modded towns, artifacts and spells, etc. or is that just not possible? For example, if you add a new artifact mod would that artifact show up in the map editor?
Will custom campaigns made with the editor be supported in VCMI?
Will there still be hardcoded limits in the VCMI engine or is just about anything possible? For example, I have heard that some spell effects will be hardcoded and not possible to replicate in a mod such as the teleport spell or the dimension door spell. Sorry if this question does not make sense I do not know much about coding.
Thank you in advance for taking the time to answer these questions if you don’t mind… I really appreciate it, and look forward to seeing the project be completed! Thanks!
Thank you so much for your prompt reply, and for all of your information as well! This is great! I really appreciate your reply. I will read more about it from the links you sent. I’m sorry, I should have delved more into it myself, and read older posts, before asking all of my questions. Cheers!!
Answer for myself, but I suppose I’m not alone there. Personally when I implement something or merge others code I do a lot of H3 testing. There also awesome wiki’s and forum topics around as well as FizMiG document (sadly it’s only in Russian) that help to check H3 behaviour when testing not possible.
In many cases testing takes more time than actual coding.
VCMI change some game mechanics, but when it’s possible there is option to switch to original.
I currently started to list them on wiki (likely many not included there): wiki.vcmi.eu/index.php?title=Game_mechanics
If you know something where VCMI behaviour is different than in H3 please report those on bug tracker. It’s important to have these differences logged even if not everything can be easily fixed, e.g: bugs.vcmi.eu/view.php?id=1555
Keep in mind that some things like AI (adventure and battle) behaviour wouldn’t be reproduced by VCAI because of completely different design. Though VCMI open source so if someone decide to spend tons of time on H3 AI reverse engineering it’s possible to introduce AI that will work exactly as in H3.
Yep I think I seen in at least few times when googled something. Though I don’t generally go in topics to check random information because so far there is far more already known issues or missing features than I have time available.
