Comments - bak

Nevermind, you aren't following me or simply don’t understand English. I'm still thankful for your attention, though.

I already have that, but it’s just vanilla campaigns missing all the enhancements from this mod.

That's why I set out looking for a way to play your stuff but on HotA engine.

.orc files are essentially series of concatenated encrypted .zip archives where the password to each individual zip is a text string containing the full internal path to the encrypted resource file... then there’s a CRC at the end of each whole .orc

Circa 2008, there was an extractor circulating around the web, and a separate tool that could pack the modified assets back. The tools were allegedly made by Siberian Gremlin from extractor.ru forums (sibgrem@rambler.ru, siberian-studio.ru)

P.S. I’ve used ReShade with a number of games and know what it is and how it works, in AoЕ it looks like *** on wheels and IMO is totally redundant. AoE is just a different visual style from a different era.

Is it possible to switch the fake fullscreen scaling filter to catmull-rom? So far it feels like simple bilinear. Catmull-rom is a variant of bicubic that looks great with this sort of art (it's the default option in IWD2EE)

Hurrrrrah!

Exported Chronicles & H3 Complete campaigns are perfectly playable & winnable in HotA: Moddb.com

I was looking for a way to play your fixed / modified campaigns with all HotA changes in a similar way.

Always highlighting a creature’s tile footprint in one color and its melee range in another would revolutionize this otherwise underappreciated game. A destination footprint shadow under the mouse pointer would be a godsend, too. The combat grid could be simply made of tiny crosses at the intersection of tiles, not this massive checkerboard with 50% of battlefield obscured by the darker squares (playing with the grid turned off is a mess!)

Please also consider streamlining the extra dwellings, like optionally allowing building both L2s for the AI and human players while disallowing the rest. Sadly 90% of the time the L2 choice has to be a tank because the L1s alone just have too little health to hang on. Also nearly all L2s are iconic, amazing and great to have both. With both L1s and L2s available, there’s more tactical freedom to picking just one L3 and L4. Currently the choice of L2 kinda nails the choice of L3 and to a lesser extent L4.

Moving guards break the AI on higher difficulties, the game is said to run a modified H3 AI and they never coded in an awareness of the neutral armies’ ability to move. Forcing stationary guards at all times greatly improves the AI’s survivability at higher difficulties where otherwise it tends to shoot its foot.

Thank you for your hard work. I’ve been missing the wacky style of H4 for so many years. It has these really archaic medusas with legs and horrifying visages like those on the pre-classical Greek pottery and minotaurs not dressed up like power fantasy LARPers. Also not everybody is wearing as much armor and bling as possible and those ridiculous gaits look almost like postmodernist art in 2024. Compared to the average fantasy setting of, say, a Ubisoft title—this is a goddamn gem.

Hi HC_VIP!

I really want to play the enhanced/fixed campaigns from this mod using h3hota.exe because of all the QoL and balance changes (I don't like or use SOD_SP).

I found a rip of each and every NWC Campaign (Chronicles + RoE + AB + SoD) which is a bunch of .h3c files, sadly they are missing the intermission videos, music, and voiceovers. They still work in HotA, though.

So how do I rip the modded campaigns from this mod as well as those from RoE + AB + SoD so that they are playable in HotA with all that stuff?

I really don't care about the campaign and mission selection screens or Chronicles intros for that matter, I just want to have a bunch of dismembered .h3c’s in my Maps folder that would let me play all the official campaigns with fully animated & voiced intermissions and outros.

I know how to use Grayface’s editing tools to rip stuff or insert it back into .lod’s but I have no idea which files I have to rip and whether I must repackage them as a .lod or simply leave them scattered under a specific path.

Ideally I want to make a patch for Heroes III Complete that bakes all the Chronicles stuff right into the base .lod’s, but exposes the .h3c files to h3hota.exe with all the intermission and outro stuff still correctly linked.

Campaign Editor apparently has the capability to edit the video/voiceover/music stuff and scans some specific .lod(s) for the available options... So I guess even orphaned .h3c’s can be (re)linked to the appropriate stuff as long as it’s added into some base .lod.

I’m using GOG Heroes III Complete and Chronicles Complete.

Thanks!

This probably has been multiple times reported due to how many buildings are affected, but hey, just to stay on the safe side: certain town screen buildings (e.g. Asylum town hall) shift a couple of pixels to the side when moused over (the "highlighted state" sprite is misaligned from the normal sprite). Doesn't happen with vanilla heroes4.exe. Been running both executables with Verok's OpenGL wrapper 1.51 at 1920x1080 and 1366x768.

I played PoL circa 1998 and I recall the character, but I'm shocked to learn that he actually had this very portrait back then, and it's in fact genuine NWC art! You have my apologies.

Up to this moment, I've also been dead sure that Joseph's portrait is a homage to the tragically passed HotA lead Docent Picolan I.postimg.cc but hey, a quick search tells me it's also a decades-old piece of NWC art. I'm aware that photoshopping pictures of real people into in-game character portraits was a running gag at NWC back in the day, maybe that's why even today some of these portraits kinda skirt the uncanny valley.

As for the Putin reference, a few months ago I spotted at least two very pro-war Kremlin troll farm accounts using Ibn Fadlan's portrait as their profile pic on Reddit and my initial thought was "it's just another edgy Putin photoshop that exist in the millions", so I didn't really give it much thought back then. Imagine my shock when I accidentally remembered where I last saw that face (in H3SW obviously).

A most bizarre fact is that Putin only started looking like Ibn Fadlan in about 2019 due to his face suddenly beginning to melt because of age, illness, or simply fielding a flawed body double: I.postimg.cc

There have been a number of sad incidents when (so far thankfully non-HoMM) modders of Russian origin hid pro-war or pro-Kremlin statements in their work (e.g. Whitemare 2 level names but I'm not gonna list every instance) and people got banned over it across multiple communities including Morrowind and Doom II. Stupid me bumping into this portrait--used as an obvious dog whistle by a couple of war enablers on Reddit--made a very wrong and false assumption.

Once again, you have my apologies.

Most melee creatures have an attack distance of 1 tile, but in a cramped situation they will sometimes come up close and attack at point blank. Is it at least theoretically moddable to somehow highlight this attack distance around creature stacks on the combat grid?

Smaller creatures seem to occupy squares composed of 2x2 or 4x4 tiles but larger ones are more tricky: they have a 6x6 base minus the corner tiles, so kinda circle. Is it moddable to highlight the tiles occupied by each stack at all times?

Is it possible to highlight a stack's destination tiles under the mouse pointer when ordering a stack to move? Precise stack positioning is extremely hard without the destination footprint clearly visible, especially due to how the combat grid is warped because of the pseudo 3D terrain.

These things are probably the biggest factor that made H4 so unpopular: there's no reliable way of knowing if a stack will end up in an enemy's melee range which exceeds a stack's footprint by 1 tile, and a stack's footprint itself is not even perfectly square for the larger creatures.

Can AI use the extra town dwellings?

If so, it stands to reason to make just L2 dwellings mutually non-exclusive — otherwise the balance will be toppled.

Is there a way to edit the module so it only allows an extra L2 dwelling but no L3/L4 AND it’s possible for the AI to build and use the extra dwelling?

P.S. The new town buildings seem like the only bad idea in the entire mod, turned them off immediately.

The in-game portrait of the Dervish hero Ibn Fadlan very obviously is a traced picture of Vladimir Putin. Is that really necessary or appropriate after 22 Feb 2022?

See: https://i.postimg.cc/XJD6XtLt/Ibn-Fadlan.jpg

Alkaline and Dwell! Hell yeah! P.S. I just LOVE how the guns are shifted to the right but kinda stick around the center at the same time. It feels both old school and better than old school.

AD and copper support is fantastic news, any chance for Dwell or Alkaline support in the future? Those are pretty massive expansions just like AD.

Any chance for future compatibility with Enhanced Resource Pack?

Like maybe all the weapons & HUD elements & custom fx stay standard definition as made by you, but the enemies & textures use ERP assets.

Can I use this to play the original 2004 version of D3 and the expansions? Because BFG Edition sucks in so many ways...

Okay I'll try to reproduce the borked guardian bug. It had been haunting me for a while but Raze has seen quite a few updates since.

See my "UPD" comment below, it's probably permanent but only affects Twin Dragon. I’ll give it a check once I have time. I clearly remember super short Guardians while running the SW pack, and I clearly remember seeing normal Guardians most of the time. Guardians in just Twin Dragon mistakenly assigned the height of Wizards from Wanton Destruction is probably what I was running into.

Did someone say they intended to fix the offsets for CP in the future?

What could be wrong with launching mods via .bat scripts?

UPD: my memory likely *was* failing me, now I remember more clearly: it’s the guardians in Twin Dragon who were being reduced to the height of their wizard counterparts in Wanton Destruction while running the Shadow Warrior upscale pack. Looks like it forces the same entity height for both expansions, probably for the zombie ninja / Chinese hitman duo too.

My bad, I should have mentioned I'm on Raze. Doesn't it have a filters feature? As a last resort maybe rip Cryptic Passage into a standalone mod (like that well-known script for ripping Alien World Order outta World Tour), rename it and use the "filters" thing on the upscale pack’s side to load the addon-specific stuff once it sees it’s not the base game? At least for Raze.

But wait... On Raze the broken textures in Cryptic Passage were like a dozen random wall tiles across the various levels replaced with some frames of the Beast, or to be more precise the Beast frames were slapped onto the walls like decals, their alpha filled by an underlying texture that clearly wasn’t part a Beast frame itself. It looked like lifesize Beast stickers in random places. That was enough to make the game look screwed but perhaps it’s not *exactly* the eduke32 phenomenon you are talking about? I genuinely freaked out when I saw that thing literally come out of the woodwork before I realized it was a mere texture... This was the first time the game actually scared me in some 15 years...

BTW I vaguely recall that when I started Wanton Destruction with the Shadow Warrior upscale pack loaded and then aborted a session to start the vanilla campaign without quitting the game to desktop, the green Guardian dude suddenly was the height of a toddler. Something wrong was going on with the monsters that were totally reskinned for Wanton Destruction, it happened conditionally but I can't fully remember or check right now. It felt like sprite heights were wrongly carried over / not refreshed properly between SW and WD, and it happened only with the upscale pack.

The wizard replacing the guardian is rather short, if my memory doesn't fail me his height unexpectedly applied to the guardian when I first started the addon then chose to abort the run in favor of starting the vanilla campaign...

I also remember I somehow wasn't seeing ten foot tall wizards if I first started vanilla and met some guardians then started the addon.

Is it still being worked on?

So I guess they kinda override the same vanilla stuff so making them sit in parallel to each other would require a lot of renaming and a lot more new, separate entities?

Cryptic Passage is so messed up with the upscale pack... Monster sprites replacing certain wall textures, etc.

Magic-based hitscan weapons are clearly begging for custom puffs...

The huge bow only does either 120, or 240, or 360 damage. Something wrong with its RNG coding?

A stupid question, yet still... any plans to merge the base game with the expansions in a way that simply allows to pick one of the three campaigns in the main menu?

Any chance you would consider adapting Arcane Dimensions? (Sans the few maps that Darkplaces can't handle due to engine limitations)

It would be cool to have an option to speed up monster death animations (which will also make them appear more smooth). Voxels somehow expose how slow the vanilla ones are. Imps fall to the ground especially slowly...

Dynamic lights seem to play really well with the voxels. Running this with PSX Doom CE I was shocked how beautifully the hell nobles’ projectiles lit up their bodies upon firing. An option to natively attach dynamic lights to the monsters’ muzzle flashes and projectiles would be another famtastic addition.