Forgotten Heroes

Pol · Unread postby **Pol** » 11 Jul 2006, 18:11

Just to link up, with my older threat(d) on the old RT about heroes coming back, here is actual index:

** So, thou far bout my progress... **

Proposals are welcomed - This is my idea, of course.

_________________________________________-
When it will be done I will host them in Steve's&My yahoo groups...

mr.hackcrag · Unread postby **mr.hackcrag** » 11 Jul 2006, 19:11

I didn't recognize some of the heroes on your image, so I voted "everywhere" because they all look nice. Unfortunately, I didn't see "Charity" from H2. She was my favorite necromancer...

Pol · Unread postby **Pol** » 11 Jul 2006, 19:42

Charity, hmm..., it can be I will consider her to be back

- rest of heroes are from various games and authors, Disciples and Luis Royo. They are get from Steve's archive, but remastered.

The Mystic X is from Master of Magic, my favourite -

(second from the up and second from the left)

mr.hackcrag · Unread postby **mr.hackcrag** » 11 Jul 2006, 20:19

Pol wrote:Charity, hmm..., it can be I will consider her to be back - rest of heroes are from various games and authors, Disciples and Luis Royo.

Aren't Luis Royo's artwork amazing? I've never met anyone who has seen his work until now. He's one of the best fantasy artist who's work I've seen.

Also, when you say you consider to bring them back, does that mean that your going to put them in the game with bio's, artwork, speciality, etc? You must really be working hard on your project! If I can help, let me know. Good luck!

Pol · Unread postby **Pol** » 11 Jul 2006, 21:06

Glad to meet you, then.. did you ever see Royo? He is a strange chap, really... (I had seen one of his photos)

Mostly, it's supposed to be WoG patch, where will be added new heroes, not all, just these who not left to Axeoth. Yes, to graphics and text and big question mark over specialities, theirs support in WoG it's still insufficient, hopefully it will be better with 3.59 but when it will be no know.

My analysis of this suggest 97.3 probabilities that my project will revert into beauty, after years spent over...

mr.hackcrag · Unread postby **mr.hackcrag** » 11 Jul 2006, 23:52

[quote="Pol"]

Glad to meet you, then.. did you ever see Royo? He is a strange chap, really... (I had seen one of his photos)

Mostly, it's supposed to be WoG patch,

Nice to meet you too. Don't think I've ever seen Royo, but it wouldn't surprise me if he looked "strange." Many geniuses tend to look strange.

Unfortunately, I don't have WoG installed on my computer. I've never played it, but I've found all the changes to be very overwhelming for me. I've heard many great things about it, but I mostly just want to play the same old homm3 (SoD), but with all the little changes that would make it better, like the spell patch we talked about earlier. (And of course a classic rampart faction!)

Regardless, I hope that all your hard work pays off and you create a masterpiece that all homm players can enjoy.

ByteBandit · Unread postby **ByteBandit** » 12 Jul 2006, 02:42

If you like all the specialty stuff for just HoMM3 (SoD), we have some files for download on Map Archive 6. Just add them to your data file and you're set. (For even more trait files, Downoad the Map "Dual Quest" on Archive 6 in the "Other Maps" file.) These appear to be "lost" trait files from another site that disappeared on us.
Pol and I are discussing of not only making HoMM2 portraits for WoG, but also available for regular HoMM3 as well.

mr.hackcrag · Unread postby **mr.hackcrag** » 12 Jul 2006, 03:14

Wow, I never knew about this place! I've looked in the "files" section and mostly found a bunch of maps. Towards the bottom, there were some stuff about hero portraits, and also a "balance" file, but I'm not really sure what changes it makes. I was also wondering if I should back-up any files before I extract everything into the data file in case I want to revert back to the original settings?

Thank you so much for the for directing me here. It's really amazing!

ByteBandit · Unread postby **ByteBandit** » 12 Jul 2006, 13:33

No, I don't think you need to back up your files. Although you could if you wanted to I suppose. It's probably better if you just keep the zipped file you downloaded and use that as your back up. You can always go in the zip file and cross reference in your Heroes 3/data file for the files you want or don't want.

Dual Quest is located in the "Other Maps" file on BBVI. The map file contains portraits and other trait files we don't have up yet. Eventually, well extract the trait files and make them available for those who don't want to play the map Dual Quest.

mr.hackcrag · Unread postby **mr.hackcrag** » 12 Jul 2006, 16:43

The heroes portraits are nice, but is there any way to preview what the portrait will look like before actually assigning them to a specific faction? I don't have any program that can view pcx files.

Also, in the "balance" zip folder, there are many different text documents. Do I simply extract these into the data file for them to take effect, or is there another method? And what exactly do all these files balance?

Thanks again for the info, I don't really have any experience with modding, so I appreciate your help.

Pol · Unread postby **Pol** » 12 Jul 2006, 16:50

Yes, if you will extract anything into data folder it will immediately take effect. The NWC programmers used this to tweaking the game.

IrfanView can preview pcx and many other formats, fair good for the task.

* The balance files can change stats of units, descriptions, spells etc - eek, here, with WoG here is bundled nice editor for them

mr.hackcrag · Unread postby **mr.hackcrag** » 12 Jul 2006, 20:16

Thanks Pol, Irfan is really good.

I played a little bit using the balance files, but didn't really notice too much difference...

Also, is there any place to get the portraits for the default homm3 heroes? I was thinking about switching the portraits of a few heroes...

ByteBandit · Unread postby **ByteBandit** » 13 Jul 2006, 00:26

mr.hackcrag wrote: Also, is there any place to get the portraits for the default homm3 heroes? I was thinking about switching the portraits of a few heroes...

If you registered on Map Archive VI, you should see a huge selection of portraits to choose from. If you want to know what portrait to assign to a specific Hero, check out the Photos section and you'll see what numbers are assign to each Hero. Remember the smaller pcx is labeled "hps" and the larger one "hpl." So, to assign the first Hero it would look something like this: hpl000kn for the larger pic and hps000kn for the smaller one. (kn being Knight)
Check the photo section for better detail.

mr.hackcrag · Unread postby **mr.hackcrag** » 13 Jul 2006, 01:31

Thank you ByteBandit. Actually, I had already figured out all that stuff by now. I was actually wondering if there were portraits of the original homm3 heroes created by 3d0/nwc. For example, like taking Crag Hack's portrait and switching it with Sandro. (That's just an example, I don't actually want to do that.

)I didn't notice any of them on Map Archive 6, but maybe I just overlooked it.

While we're on the subject, I was curious of how difficult it is to do all the modding and original creations that you guys do. Did you simply learn it by experimenting, or do you have proffesional experience. I'm kind of interested to learn it, but I might not have the technical know-how... I imagine it takes a lot of patience too.

ByteBandit · Unread postby **ByteBandit** » 13 Jul 2006, 03:05

Well, I use Adobe Photshop to make the pics. It is very time consuming, yes. But not all that hard once you figure it out. And I'm self taught. No one showed me how to do it. I just jumped into it and told myself I was going to do this! :-) Took me a couple of days and nights to figure out how to do it. But I'm a slow learner anyway. LoL.
Now I have a newer version of Adobe, have'nt quite figured it out yet, and I'm doing other things that involve the Archives right now.
Also, the Archives are not MY Archives as Pol suggested in a previous post. They belong to everybody. Pol and I make sure that everything is up to date and that no one hassles anyone else. :-) Enjoy!

As to your suggestion for rearranging portraits, I suppose you could take the original HoMM3 Heroes pics from the Photos section of BBVI and convert them to pcx and rename them the way you want. Right off hand, I don't know where you could get those pics. Possibly ModHomm.

mr.hackcrag · Unread postby **mr.hackcrag** » 13 Jul 2006, 05:13

Your story has inspired me to jump right into it too. But I'm afraid I'm already stuck. I took the text file "sptraits" that I downloaded from the "balance" zip, and modified the damage on a few spells. But when I went to test it on a map, there was no change in damage when I cast the spell.

But I also noticed that the spell "death ripple" before I made any changes had a damage value of 10. I assume that this is 10xpower. I'm pretty sure without the "balance" file, death ripple used to deal 5xpower. However, when I cast death ripple, it was still dealing 5xpower instead of 10x. Is the balance mod not working for some reason, or am I just really dumb.

I could have just been mistaken of it's value because it was hard to read all the columns of text. I was using excel to read it and made the changes in the text file.

I hope this is not too confusing to read. And I also hope I'm not bothering you will all these posts. You guys have already helped me so much...

Pol · Unread postby **Pol** » 13 Jul 2006, 08:57

Here are indexes, for help you with portraits replacing:

All in one place...

* Don't know. But finally crafted this:

mr.hackcrag · Unread postby **mr.hackcrag** » 13 Jul 2006, 13:52

Wow, I can't believe you went through all that trouble for me! I hope you didn't spend too much time on it, because ByteBandit had already directed me to the codes for the portraits.

I think I have a dumb question though. If I want to make a portrait of "Rissa" for example from the list, will I need a program like photoshop that ByteBandit mentioned earlier? I'm so silly that I tried to convert each individual portrait from the sheet using "save as."

The Charity portrait looks really nice. I'm definitely going to use it. Thank you!

Pol · Unread postby **Pol** » 13 Jul 2006, 14:30

Wow, I can't believe you went through all that trouble for me! I hope you didn't spend too much time on it, because ByteBandit had already directed me to the codes for the portraits.

It did IrfanView and it did quite fast

?
If you want to use a different portrait fo Rissa, you need to seek which number it has> HPL038AL.PCX and HPS038AL.PCX first must have 58x64 and the second 48x32px.

Secondly grab one image, or capture it from the sheet, using IrfanView once again and put him into data folder. Rename it to match the Rissa, check dimension and format, must be pcx. Run the game new Rissa will be in

So generally, because we precreated portraits for you, you will don't need to use Photoshop. But if you will wish to create your owns, and IrfanView crop&resize&convert ability would be insufficent you will really need to strech for some image editor. GIMP is free, Photoshop is best and here are many in the rest.

Great! Here is the little one:

mr.hackcrag · Unread postby **mr.hackcrag** » 13 Jul 2006, 14:52

Oh, now I see! I can't believe I couldn't figure that out by myself.

Do you have any comment about the post at the top this page about "sptraits", and "crtraits"?

I can't thank you guys enough. You're really amazing!

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