After months of hard work in hiding we founded this board to communicate with people from outside of our Team.
We’re faithful fans of the Heroes of Might and Magic saga for many years now. Especially the third part is close to our hearts. It has great possibilities, an unbelievable playability “life” and wonderful, detailed 2D graphics. The expansions - SoD and AB were also great and have expanded the possibilities of one of my favourite games. It is also why I like the idea of the ‘In the Wake of Gods’ add-on so much.
Unfortunately WoG is reaching its limits concerning its possibilities. The lack of the source code makes it impossible to add many things which fans would want in the game. And even the extraordinary skills of Slava with the reverse engineering processes aren’t enough here. Some things just aren’t possible to do for a human working with the machine code. WoG reaches the limits more and more often - the best example being the 256 creature limit.
Because of our knowledge in computer science and experience in developing C++ projects we wanted to develop an executable. As creating new features for WoG in high - level language is impossible (lack of source code) we decided to write one. We named our project VCMI and started to develop it on May 2007.
We want to rewrite the entire H3 engine giving it new possibilities. Over seven months of intensive work resulted in creating application with impressive amount of features. Here is list of selected VCMI’s features:
full def, lod and snd handling
almost complete h3m handling (about 97% done) - including RoE, AB, SoD and WoG maps openability
selecting single player maps and choosing start options
displaying map surface with roads, rivers and objects, displaying adventure map GUI
moving heroes, interactions with some objects (ie. collecting resources)
interactive minimap
almost complete hero screen, significant advances with town screen.
Yes, it’ll be possible. Without 256 creatures limit
And in further future we’ll add support for modpacks, so it’ll be possible to add/modify creatures without modifying .exe file (and have several mods installed at the same time without any conflicts).
But there still a LOT of work to do (we need at least an year more).
And we also need your help in testing. We have to know if it’s working on different configurations, what are the bugs and so on.
We rely on you, people
At the moment VCMI supports only TTF fonts and we can easily change them (but those don’t seem to be TTF or even available), change of graphics isn’t a problem. If we had new graphics with appropriate palettes, we could include them.
Hallo I have offer. 8 Players in game is too small, because There are 9 factions in game now and may be minimum 3 factions will be added in future (Bastion, Kremlin, Pirates town). Therefore I offer if it is possible make 16 players.
It’s a good idea, but adding 8 additional factions would make it necessary to change many graphics. When VCMI reaches the stage at which additional features may be added, it will be surely considered.
Very interesting. And having a native Linux version is even more interesting.
Any numbers of creatures is nice, too. There should be some configuration interface for this allows creation of incompatible games
A comparable nice thing would be other types of towns. And then some minor realignements. Configurable, of course. Some of the H4 ideas where quite good, so this new version could be a real big improvement over the original game and over WoG, too.
From time to time i do some erm scripting. The second peasant script was from me. The whole scripting should be redone, though. It was done too fast. So there are lots of functions with similar or nearly equal functionality. It would be good to first create some library script with functions that could be reused by virtually any script you might think of. If you need help about that, and as far as i have time, i would like to add this
At the moment VCMI has very little support for scripts. But we are going to implement possibility to switch between different mods on one installation :). ERM scripts are also going to be supported, but we prefer Lua as scripting language as it is much more readable. Unfortunately, both thing wouldn’t happen before VCMI 0.6 or even 0.7 (so you have to wait at least a month).
