Disclaimer: I am rather new here so all of you who worked hard for this project do not put to hearth everything I say. These are my opinions and I want to make them known (in case someone is interested).
I was surprised that I had to have WoG for VCMI. I was under the impression VCMI will remake H3 and treat WOG and everything else like a mod. (Although the title is VCMI Project - Heroes 3: WoG recreated).
As some of you know from recent HotA discussions on HC and from previous experiences there are strong opinions about the different flavors of H3. (I for one gave WoG a try some years ago for single player and now I just do not bother with it. While it has a LOT of nice features and improvements over vanilla, it also comes with a ton of “bad” stuff).
So why not keep it simple with VCMI? Everything that is not H3 Vanilla is a mod. Everyone can choose what they play and if they want vanilla they should not be forced to download and install WoG. It will simplify the install process and will reduce misunderstandings.
… and rename the project to plain VCMI - Heroes 3 Recreated.
**Edit: **It will also speed up release date if WoG features are set to lower priority as of now. I think it was useful to make the project together this way to see what is needed but now that you have a clear view vanilla H3 should be priority.
I like the stuff you’ve done with HotA. Proof of concept! Something to show to the people and to see what is needed from VCMI’s side. But development focus remaining on Vanilla.
(I played under 50h with VCMI, reported 3 bugs and I am “managing stuff” please do not kick me out).
You must understand that VCMI started in 2007 - that was after WoG 3.58 release but long before projects like HotA became well-know. As far as I know this the reason behind “WoG recreated”.
Current situation is quite good from my point of view (not a huge WoG supporter) - the only implemented large chunks of WoG (commanders and stack experience) are optional and can be disabled.
Right now it is theoretically possible to make WoG completely optional but it is still too early - we need more from our modding system to allow this. For example right now it is impossible to change any of H3 objects (e.g. creatures) via mods or to have different amount of data in some of text files. Both of these are needed to make WoG optional.
Until this happens I don’t think that optional WoG is an option.
To be fair - I’m actually surprised how (relatively) easy it was to implement all of this. But I am not sure that simple “focus on vanilla” will work. Why? Most of H3 functionality is already here. Missing pieces like RMG, good AI, multiplayer require a lot of time and good skills.
Implementing modding made some of our code more organized, revealed some hidden bugs. And more important - after next release it will give more popularity to VCMI. Which means more people for bug hunting
Don’t worry about this too much - I don’t think that somebody was ever banned here except for spambots.
It is hard to put it in a few words but the above is my opinion also. With a “simple” HotA demonstration you can show that it is fast and easy to add an additional mod in VCMI once it is already made. Unlike reverse engineering.
And about WoG, HotA, Vanilla and the like…they all come with outstanding improvements but they also come with “silly” ones that will make people decide if it is worth it for them to play that version. I would prefer more separation. One mode for Cove town, one for extra buildings, and one Huge pack of all these mods called HotA. this way you can have Cove in vanilla with very few extras.
I know it can get tedious from some point onwards but is important to have a finished modding system. for example I have noticed debugging is slow (on my PC at least) so having less resources to load (WoG) will help every time anyone starts a debug. One of the best features of config files right now is that if you need to make a minor change to a creature/artifact you do not have to recompile!
One of the reasons I decided to rest from modding system is because I want to finish it
Our content loading has been significantly improved with mods support but code used to display all of this is quite poor in some places (oh… how I “love” our DefHandler…). A lot of bugs connected to GUI are due to hard to manage old code. Fixing this will not only give us some new functionality (most notably - 32 bit graphics) but will also improve modding system (removing somewhat confusing iconIndex’es in favor of direct filenames)
I doubt that this is connected to WoG resources.
For me startup time is ~1 second. Around 2/3 of this time is something completely unrelated to WoG, remaining 1/3 is a mix of WoG and H3. If you’re lucky you may get 10% faster start but that’s probably top limit.
