Open source and other things :)

International board General discussion
#1

I could have posted this in polish but I felt that english speaking forum needs something to stay alive :slight_smile: … Furthermore there are couple interesting things mentioned by devs in the polish speaking forum that I guess some non polish speaking people would also like to know :wink:

    • It was mentioned by devs that this project will may be open source from version 0.7 (but they promise nothing). To be exact everything would be open beside libs regarding h3 formats (save games, maps, etc)
    • One of the reason for not open-sourcing the engine from the start is the fact that it would enable some nasty cheating in h3 multiplayer mode… Since people mostly play h3SOD when it comes to multi this was a strong reason to not hurt the multiplayer heroes community.
    • There was a question about making an separate heroes-like game based on the engine… A game without any of original H3 graphics… I guess it would be something like Freeciv, Freecol , or Freeorion … It could have been named Freeheroes :slight_smile:

Since those two things are important from my point of view I would like to post my comment on this.

It’s fine to not open the heroes format. I think those formats are a grey area and could lead to legal action from Ubisoft since they own the h3 code. About the multiplayer part I know that there are ways to cheat there right now and not get caught :slight_smile: MP community works in a way that good players play among the trusted ones … just because it’s so easy to cheat. I don’t think that opening h3 format code would make things worse …
Whatever the team decision is it would be nice to have the not opened (freeware) h3 format lib just as an option , meaning VCMI should have it’s own independent way to store creatures animations, game animations, save games , it’s own map format etc.
For example creatures animations frames could be just stored as separate png files in folders with each creature name / number … Storing the game data as many seaprate files would in fact make it easier for moders etc to play/work with VCMI, because from my own experience I know that extracting inserting things into lod /def files takes a lot of time.

Doing it like that would allow to produce a free software (open source) heroes like game… It’s a shame there is a freeciv (civilization like game) and no freeheroes … really. For example :
fifengine.de/ … This guys started as just re-doing a fallout engine, but now their framework is more general and there is already 5 open source game projects that uses their engine… This of course in some cases leads to contribution from people working on the games to the main engine source code …
It was said by one of VCMI dev that it’s hard to replace all the graphic stuff from h3. But really why do that ? A Freeheroes game could start with just two towns, and no upgrades for units … Castle units number could be also changed to maybe 5-6 instead of 7 … The project could grow with time , and would have other pros then large number of castles / units … For example different strategic system … good balance etc.

I browsed this site :
woggrad.ru

and I can see there are at least 2 -3 almost completed towns (water like and desert like (Bastion ))… Limiting the creatures numbers to 6 and we have 2 towns already … It’s just a meter to contact the authors and get the permission to use their work in a freeheroes game on some open license like Creative commons for example…

Doing the 2d graphics for in game terrain (we could start with just grass) and menus would be a lot of easier then doing units animations and in town screen :slight_smile:

In fact as soon as VCMI is open source and supports ERM I would consider starting a freeheroes efford myself…

#2

Thanks for an interesting and balanced opinion :slight_smile:

We’ll discuss that idea (and in case of need make appriopriate changes in code structure) after 0.7, TowDragon’s statement about possibilty of opening sources from 0.7 was IMHO hasty.

There is already one project using such name (you may check it SF and GameDev [PL] site). However, it doesn’t look to be developed any more.

I wouldn’t play a game with 2 castles, if I could play original H3 with 9 castles of better quality. It would take several years before project would be really playable (and probably it wouldn’t ever be as good as H3). I think that better idea is to concentrate efforts on making VCMI playable with original graphics.

#3

well the VCMI engine also needs a lot of work … I don’t really get the quantity of castles thing … I mean I would rather see 4-6 good balanced , unique in both strategy, playstyle , look castles then 9
I see all those cool and fine looking graphics of new towns like Bastion and think that it’s_a_waste_for_them_to_be_just_a_MOD …

Heroes 3 was a great game … the best from the series , but that doesn’t mean some things from h2,h4 or h5 are not better then h3 … A good mixture of those could end up with better homm … I’m sure there are things you are annoyed in h3 ?
things that you think that should be done differently. Most h3 fans would change sth in it.

I’m not saying you should do it, but AFAIK WoG has a graphic team right now , Maybe it would be possible to get them interested in this idea ? In this way a second to VCMI Freeheroes (or whatever the name would be ;)) team could be established and work with you when needed … I could try to speak with one person I know from the WoG team but since you guys have better contact with them I posted this idea here. I’m just saying pass the idea , if nobody likes it then it’s a pity but life goes on :slight_smile:

#4

It does, so it’s too early to undertake such a huge work as recreating H3 graphics. I think that most important thing is to finish that work with recreating engine. We must keep to our roadmap.

Bastion is AFAIK now a part of the CoreWoG project, so if they success, it’ll be added as a completely new town in the WoG 3.59. If VCMI is playable before the release of WoG 3.59, it’ll be also possible to have it as a new town.

You are right, as we’ve already stated, when most of H3:WoG features is supported by VCMI we’ll focus on adding new possibilities and some of them will be surely inspired by the best features of other parts of HMM series.

As I wrote above - I think it’s too early to undertake such project.

Actually I’m in the WoG Team, and I’m sure that at least several other members are visiting this board. Your grain have been sown. :wink:

#5

Well I definatly support the idea of open-source and why not to make it compatible with linux too, also if it’s open-source then that means that the community(and if linux-compatible then larger community) can help you even more with the development, so we may have heroes in many languages by translating teams etc

#6

AFAIK it’s possible to build VCMI on Linux (or it’ll be possible with minimal fixes). So we’re open for devs using Linux :slight_smile:
As for translating teams, VCMI practically doesn’t introduce any new text, it uses H3 language files.

#7

Linux build exists some time, it works almost as win version exclude some little things which will be fixed soon

#8

Below you will find a copy of the message I sent to Tow today. Since no response followed, I make this proposition public.

Good day. I am the leader of an enthusiast group devoted to the creation of an RTS game loosely based off the existing M&M lore (we use the GBR engine). So far we got a 2D artist, a 3D artist / modeller, a reverse engineer, a scripter and a concept writer.

The thing is, now we’re done with the basic engine modifications and want to test it in action, but haven’t made any new models yet. (Un)fortunately, most of our staff also share positions in a team engaged into making the Horn of the Abyss unofficial addon for H3:SoD, so our modeller is too busy right now to make models for our Heroes-based RTS.

So we decided to make some sprites based off models from Heroes 5, for there is a method that allows for successful extraction of model animations from that game (though few people seem to have ever cared about that). I don’t know how bad or good will these models look in our tech demo which is mainly about scripts and game mechanics (we actually don’t want any H5 models in the final version of the game, but have to get some sprites for the demo whatever those would be).

When I was fiddling with H5 models, I realized how cool H5 would look if made into a 2D game. Many of us from the df2.ru community forum think H5 was crippled by the introduction of a 3D engine. Instead of neat sprites, we got a lot of low-poly models and a totally drunken camera, let alone the unimpressive city screen graphics sporting blurry textures and angly boxes meant to represent the buildings.

I just thought you VCMI guys could strike an alliance with us to recreate Heroes 5 as a classical 2D game, carrying over all standard H5 skills, rules and game mechanics. You’ve got the source code for VCMI, so you have nothing standing in your way. I guess a 2D remake of H5 could achieve an immense popularity among old-school H3 fans dissapointed with the graphics/style/system requirements of H5 (I’ve got a Q6600 CPU overclocked to 3.2 GHz, 4 Gb of RAM and a GF 8800 Ultra and the game may lag at certain moments if all the settings including AA/AF are maxed out!).

We are going to make a ‘sabotage demo’ of our RTS game featuring a few dozen H5 units rendered as sprites, so we are about to set out on a massive sprite-making spree. Probably this thing will cause a great scandal all across the Web if it’s released all out of the blue and without comments. So we could try and render the same sprites in a classical H3 aspect to see how they are gonna look on VCMI. BTW we’d prefer the ‘Flat H5’ running with 1280x1024 resolution with a palette of 16M colors.

Here’s a couple of pics how Flat H5 could look like (sorry for the crude Photoshop work):

ipicture.ru/Gallery/Viewfull/6924885.html
ipicture.ru/Gallery/Viewfull/6924886.html

P.S. The precedent of the Grove town project for H3 proved that sprites rendered from models and textures used by another game aren’t considered plagiarism juridicially 'cause Blizzard gave no f*ck about their models used as sprites in that project, though they’re perfectly aware of it.

#9

Are there any people of such kind? Who don’t like the game only because it’s NEW, not because of setting, storyline, mechanics? In this case better not feed them so they die out shortly.

I don’t know how it’s possible, my game runs smoothly as long as there is enough RAM to pull it. Once you have FOUR times more than me, it is supposed to work even on Impossible-sized maps with underground.

Pics return “502 bad gateway” error.

#10

At least in my country (Russia) H5 enjoys much less popularity than H3, though H5 was actually developed by Russians - a bitter kind of irony. HoMM V is commonly criticised for its awful graphics and a very clumsy implementation of 3D camera. Personally I agree - the creature models severely lack polygons, ground and map object textures are very blurry even with the graphics set to maximum and the drunken 3D cam doesn’t let you comfortably overview the battlefield. Most Heroes fans whom I know over the web or personally think H3 has better graphics than H5 and here I also agree.

The H5 engine was hopelessly outdated before the game was released, and the game rather suffers than profits from use of this kind of 3D graphics.

Turn on a 16X Anti-Aliasing and 16X AA Filtering and switch the cam to a perspective view instead of facing the ground. You’ll get some pretty lags for sure.

P.S. Too bad for you your ISP can’t handle ipicture.ru. I’ll reupload them later.

#11

Man, you clearly have some odd understanding of what 3D is supposed to be. It is here to HELP and add some interesting possibilities (just like dynamic battle camera or object rotation) and improve the interface issues. It does not force you to turn up all the details, play with camera like a little child an do many other useless things just to slay the CPU with millions of details you can’t see anyway.
They are called OPTIONS on purpose, in fact all these are optional. You may use them or not in case you can’t do that properly :stuck_out_tongue: I believe programmers presumed some intelligence of player, who will set up the game so that it will HELP him, not stop working.

Of course, you can run several FPS in background - for sure you will see some SERIOUS lags. But what’s the point?
Of course, you can create a game with degenerated 2d graphics, without all 3d options and effects. For sure it will run smoothly, but at the same time it will be simply WORSE than original. Can you feel it? Now you may turn OFF some options (or just use them resonably as I do), but when you finish your work, there will be no way to improve the details.

Go on and rename your project to heroes Vista so that it will require a band of hakers to change any single option. You cna be sure that no one will spoil your game with his stupidity.

It’s like not going out because you can get robbed or hit by a thunder. Sure, stay in your bed for all life and feel safe. But expect no bonus.

Ok, no offence. I’m still interested in running H5 on the engine with improved possibilities and gameplay, but your explanation appears just ridiculous to me.

#12

Bak, we are recreating engine of Heroes 3: WoG. It’s our most important goal and we’ll keep it. We have put a lot of effort into our project and we won’t give it up in order to start recreating H5 in 2D environment. However, we are going to make VCMI highly moddable in the future - then we could implement different possibilities that will allow creation of “Heroes V” mod for VCMI. It will be possible to add new H5 graphics or replace old ones with them. We are also thinking about releasing VCMI sources under GPL license - if we decide to do it, you could find a few C++ developers and even make “VCMI: Heroes V” fork of our project.

Replacing original H3 sprites with new ones in VCMI is already possible. It’s really easy, you have to prepare new .def file and put it into the /sprites subfolder (or use /Data subfolder for .pcx/.bmp graphics). So you can run VCMI with some H5 graphics just now.

But I don’t see what can we do more for you at the moment.

#13

Great to hear that, Tow! I didn’t mean to distract you from recreating the original H3 engine. I was just wondering if there would be enough ground for cooperation and modding in the future. Once the classic H3 engine is finished, we could work together on a H5 mod (since H5 shares about 80% of base H3 game mechanics). We do have a skilled C/C++ coder on our team, but honestly a H5 mod would take quite a few coders to finish if we are to follow a sane timeline of 1-2 years after VCMI is complete.

So if VCMI is going to be so moddable we should probably start rendering H5 sprites right away. You know it’s gonna be a tremendous undertaking, for many of the original H5 models need some serious boost in the number of polygons and quality of textures, even to make some decent sprites (especially this is true about the city overview screens).

So when VCMI is finished, we’ll already have a full package of H5-styled sprites!

Currently our requirements are few and rather loose:

*Screen resolution 1280x1024
*The same proportions for global map and combat screens as in H3. So basically a pile of wood laying on the ground should appear of the same size both at 800x600 in H3 and at 1280x1024 in our mod
*A True Color palette (16M colors)
*The same hexagon-based combat screen with the same number of tiles. The square combat screen of H5 is to be gone 'cause the H3 one is immensely better and at the same time isn’t radically different. We just need it resized for 1280x1024
*A huge city overview screen. I mean, the unit/hero/stat tab is going to have very modest proportions compared to the city overview tab.
*Individual sprites are of a .png format with eight-bit alpha.

I guess the map format, ERM functionality and nearly 90% of the remaining stuff is going to be the same with VCMI. An .XML support (like in H5) would be welcome, but we could also do with plain hard-coding of all the creatures, object hierarchy and skills right into the source code.

  • Best regards, Bak.

P.S. Sharing the source code with everyone will bury the project because it gives infinite cheating opportunities. Sad but true. Unless you implement a private source anti-cheating .dll which will store all the multiplayer code mixed with cheat protection routine. So you can mod almost everything but can’t change the way the game communicates in multiplayer and checks for cheaters, so only two identical builds of the game can connect to each other in multiplayer.

#14

Great to hear that, Tow! I didn’t mean to distract you from recreating the original H3 engine. I was just wondering if there would be enough ground for cooperation and modding in the future. Once the classic H3 engine is finished, we could work together on a H5 mod (since H5 shares about 80% of base H3 game mechanics). We do have a skilled C/C++ coder on our team, but honestly a H5 mod would take quite a few coders to finish if we are to follow a sane timeline of 1-2 years after VCMI is complete.

So if VCMI is going to be so moddable we should probably start rendering H5 sprites right away. You know it’s gonna be a tremendous undertaking, for many of the original H5 models need some serious boost in the number of polygons and quality of textures, even to make some decent sprites (especially this is true about the city overview screens).

So when VCMI is finished, we’ll already have a full package of H5-styled sprites!

Currently our requirements are few and rather loose:

*Screen resolution 1280x1024
*The same proportions for global map and combat screens as in H3. So basically a pile of gold on the ground should appear of the same size both at 800x600 in H3 and at 1280x1024 in our mod
*A True Color palette (16M colors)
*The same hexagon-based combat screen with the same number of tiles. The square combat screen of H5 is to be gone 'cause the H3 one is immensely better and at the same time isn’t radically different. We just need it resized for 1280x1024
*A huge city overview screen. I mean, the unit/hero/stat tab is going to have very modest proportions compared to the city overview tab.
*Individual sprites are of a .png format with an eight-bit alpha.

I guess the map format, ERM functionality and nearly 90% of the remaining stuff is going to be the same with VCMI. An .XML support (like in H5) would be welcome, but we could also get along well with plain hard-coding of all the creatures, object hierarchy and skills right into the source code.

  • Best regards, Bak.

P.S. Sharing the source code with everyone will bury the project because it gives infinite cheating opportunities. Sad but true. Unless you implement a private source anti-cheating .dll which will store all the multiplayer code mixed with cheat protection routine. So you can mod almost everything but can’t change the way the game communicates in multiplayer and checks for cheaters, so only two identical builds of the game can connect to each other in multiplayer.

#15

In fact, there never will be a way to completely lock cheating. Fortunately it can be made very difficult. We are going to provide a closed source library for authoriziation of VCMI clients. Furthermore, cheating opprotunities are limited to gaining information like posotions of enemy heroes - all commands sent by clients are checked by server. Nick based logging into our lobby server will provide good and trustworthy hosts (server is not as limited in cheating as clients). There won’t be much space for cheating.

#16

bak, I think all your requirements will be possible to be satisfied after finishing VCMI (or at least all its important parts). Either as modpack or as separate engine fork. We’ll see.
VCMI won’t be completed soon (I think we need at least one more year, probably even more), so you have much time for preparing sprites. :slight_smile:

#17

Our C/C++ coder might be interested in joining the VCMI team in case you need an extra programmer to help finishing the VCMI engine. He’s just as big a Heroes fan as myself, and the recreation of the H3 engine looks just as important to us as our H5-themed fancies. Let me know if you want him by your side.

#18

Additional active C++ coder is what we really need :slight_smile: . I hope he won’t just join us and do nothing.

#19

Creating def is a pain … It would be nice if VCMI supported animations in just pcx/bmp format (png would be nice as it’s great format for loosless graphics) placed in the sprites subfolder… with some naming scheme… for example :

001_attack_01.pcx
001_attack_02.pcx
001_attack_03.pcx
001_attack_04.pcx

Where 001 is the number of a unit used for the unit (Original H3 has numbes for units)

#20

We’ll think about it, but I’d suggest different naming convention: each def would be a separate folder with images named 001., 002. and so on, where format could be any of these supported by SDL_image (BMP, GIF, JPEG, LBM, PCX, PNG, PNM, TGA, TIFF, XCF, XPM, XV and maybe something else). Unfortunately, unit battle animations will have to be .defs because of the specific method we use to display them.