[New Mod] Might and Magic VII: Amber island is finally out!

[neutonm]

[New Updated Post: 07.06.24]

Greetings and salutations!

The time has arrived - here's the long-awaited game: Might and Magic VII: Amber Island, along with a little trailer I made.

Features

• New outdoor maps and dungeons
• Bunch of new quest
• Expert teachers can teach their skill with discount
• Mercenaries - hired units that act as summoned units which you can upgrade.
• Lots of other QoL things

You can find more information at mod's website: https://mightandmagicmod.com

Discord Server
Dive into mod's Discord server and say hello:

GitHub
Project has its own GitHub page as well:
https://github.com/neutonm/might-and-ma ... island-mod

Trailer


Screenshots









Old Post (Archived):

Spoiler

Recently, i've made a post on reddit/r/MightAndMagic about this mod, so i'll just copy its contents here... Additionally, I've opened website dedicated to this mod. Might want to check it out: mightandmagicmod.com



Play!
Follow the steps to play it:

1. Get a fresh copy of Might and Magic VII: For Blood and Honor and install it on your PC. Preferably a GOG version.
2. Install latest patch by GrayFace (v2.5.4).
3. Download and unpack the mod into game install directory.

Mod contains slightly edited mm7.ini configuration file. It has AlwaysStrafe enabled as well as Mouse look on which you can activate in-game by pressing middle mouse button. It's best to change keyboard controls to your liking before going smashing those goblin mugs. Old controls with mouse look doesn't feel comfortable.

You'll start with party having bow skill at novice level and ID Monster, ID Item, Repair at Grand Master level. There's a healer's room on level start with NPC that will give you main quest, so you got it all packed.

There are 3 secret places + 1 secret room as well as secret gold stash. Wonder if anyone finds it, it's the last place you would hide gold in real life (or maybe not...). The boss is quite tough, so, thread carefully, adventurers...

You'll about to experience around 1 hour of gameplay. Have fun!

Support it!
So, you might be wondering - does it stop at being one dungeon mod or is it possible to grow into full mod with new world, towns, dungeons, monsters and quests? A brand "new" game within the old engine that can provide fun for many hours?

Yes, it's possible. I have the skill and experience to develop such mod, but the project is quite ambitious and very time consuming. I need your support and the best way you can help is through Patreon.

Or, if you're into crypto...
BTC bc1qcruym380p9qs2dcykz83444zu0h00kh5vf7mcl
ETH 0xE719DDc30dAB02d89F427eE76D9de90B35CB2f82
LTC LUy4fwL4i96mQKUWDg7792Fb4zXznZaT4H
Monero 47AWZfDuoQGc9qLjSX1CWtHV7Hm3RRkvNfzKYP3U67kQ3rWHTucXNPmiZHAFo5sM1ggxCjsUmcR9bTkZeWR3sCNPH7SJD5C
DOGE DMgwBxUSfwFBP8B5Quf7zmQeoFJXs3r7L2
XRP rDa3kqTodyeYmHe15UbzQcdZ6o3KGCwhcC
NANO nano_3qzi7xz5stfz1ftkwfaj8r4tnmakn49ke4ebq19996zz39tam8oddz47dp58

Misc
I just opened Discord server - feel free to dive in. Other than it, i have twitter account where i'm planning to post frequently about the development of the mod if this idea won't flop.

This wouldn't be possible to make without the wonderful tools (and patch) by Sergey Rozhenko aka GrayFace.

I'm looking forward to your feedback, advice and ideas. Don't forget to post your score when you complete the mod

Screenshots

[Tomsod]

This is pretty awesome! We do have a couple of good mods here, but few have really tried to model new dungeons -- it is a lot of work. Good luck! I think your project is gonna be popular, people have been asking for stuff like this. If you need some hacking-related advice for whatever you're gonna do (i.e. game engine stuff that MMExtension doesn't expose yet), feel free to ask me! I'm somewhat accustomed with MM7 assembly, and I'd like to help.

[neutonm]

It is, hence the support section

Thanks! I will keep it mind. Currently there are some issues with the mmext, but it looks llke grayface got that covered.
Mostly there's need for limitation removal. I'd really like to add new items and monsters, currently i can only replace them in mm7.

I think the need for assembly sorcery will come sooner or later as the project grows.

[Tomsod]

Adding new items shouldn't really be difficult, there's plenty of space in items.txt. I'm adding new artifacts to my own mod literally right now, and they all seem to work fine (I did have to explicitly include them to the random artifact pool, but it's not an issue for ordinary items). You just need to edit items.txt, and also rnditems.txt if you want the item to appear randomly, provide a picture, and that's it? Unless you want some special behavior. Or if it's a paperdoll-modifying armor -- these are tricky, but I actually managed to add new body armor before. I can probably help if that's the problem.

Monsters are more tricky, yes. There's no free space for new monsters in the game. Usually when I want to extend these kinds of arrays, I just allocate a new, bigger array, and hand-patch all references to the old one to refer to the new one instead. There seem to be 30-ish such places in the code for the monsters array, so it's probably doable as well. How many monsters do you plan to add anyway?

[neutonm]

Yeah, i tried adding new quest item and that didn't worked. I'm not sure whether it's a common item limit or quest item limit, but if you try to add new quest item into items.txt (at 800 index) and put it into the chest the item will appear with broken sprite and gibberish in descriptio (mm7).

About monsters... well, i plan to import some of them from mm8 and probably mm6. Not sure how many of them. The idea is to make at least 20 dungeons, so potentially 60 of them at best.

[Tomsod]

Well yeah, adding 800+ items would require expanding the item array, but my point is, you can, say, replace the unused quest item 790 instead, and the new item will work properly. There's a lot of unused items like that, so I see no need to enable 800+ indices unless you want to add like hundreds of new item types.

As for monsters, 60 should be no problem. I'll see what I can do. Although I'm not 100% sure that MM8 and especially MM6 use precisely the same kinds of monster animations. Given that Merge is a thing, they probably do, but I never investigated that.

[Rodril]

Hello.
These two scripts from the merge are compatible with MM7 engine:
https://gitlab.com/letr.rod/mmmerge/-/b ... tLimit.lua
https://gitlab.com/letr.rod/mmmerge/-/b ... Limits.lua

Put them into your Scripts\Structs\After folder, after that you'll be able to add almost unlimited amount of new lines to Monsters.txt, Placemon.txt and Hostile.txt (rows as well).

[Tomsod]

All right, I've finished playing the demo, and it was pretty fresh! I once considered trying to model a new dungeon myself, but then concluded that without new graphics it would inevitably be derivative; you proved me wrong now. While there are some resemblances to vanilla castles and dungeons, it's still original enough to look good! Minimap is a bit wonky at times, but otherwise it's nearly perfect. I'm gonna try playing with MMEditor myself -- coincidentally I need a tiny one-room level for my mod, and modeling it should let me gauge how hard it really is to me. Maybe someday I'll too create a real dungeon.

[neutonm]

Hello.
These two scripts from the merge are compatible with MM7 engine:
https://gitlab.com/letr.rod/mmmerge/-/b ... tLimit.lua
https://gitlab.com/letr.rod/mmmerge/-/b ... Limits.lua

Put them into your Scripts\Structs\After folder, after that you'll be able to add almost unlimited amount of new lines to Monsters.txt, Placemon.txt and Hostile.txt (rows as well).

Thanks!

All right, I've finished playing the demo, and it was pretty fresh! I once considered trying to model a new dungeon myself, but then concluded that without new graphics it would inevitably be derivative; you proved me wrong now. While there are some resemblances to vanilla castles and dungeons, it's still original enough to look good! Minimap is a bit wonky at times, but otherwise it's nearly perfect. I'm gonna try playing with MMEditor myself -- coincidentally I need a tiny one-room level for my mod, and modeling it should let me gauge how hard it really is to me. Maybe someday I'll too create a real dungeon.

I'll be glad to try that future dungeon as well.

As for minimap, Grayface increased facet limits thus making it possible to craft larger dungeon, but the outline number (wireframe version of dungeon on minimap) still remains unchanged hence the minimap artifacts. Supposingly to be fixed in future patches.

Making new textures is an extra effort and it takes some experience to make it consistent to other textures. Personally, i'm fine with the old stuff and will make new dungeons utilizing original assets with perhaps couple of changes like wall portraits.

[neutonm]

walkthrough video for custom dungeon for those who have no possibility to play the mod, but really wants to see it in action:

[neutonm]

Development continues! This time it's an outdoor map - Port Island, a starting location for future "full demo":

[uhm]

Very nice idea, although first dungeon with GM weapon skills is quite easy We definitely need more creations of this kind, I was always wondering, how the hell Thief series has hundreds of fanmade missions and M&M has only several mission mods. Keep my fingers crossed for you

Be careful when stepping close to this waterfall, my heroes got stuck and I had to reload

https://i.postimg.cc/j5H71tYQ/asdfas.png

Edit: Found hidden wall with bow behind it and also money hidden by poor Goblin with slipped trousers ;p . Wonder what are the other secrets.

[neutonm]

Very nice idea, although first dungeon with GM weapon skills is quite easy We definitely need more creations of this kind, I was always wondering, how the hell Thief series has hundreds of fanmade missions and M&M has only several mission mods. Keep my fingers crossed for you

Thanks! You probably mean artifacts, cuz GM skills are quite harmless: identity item/monster, repair.
I was thinking about adding difficulty option. Veterans should be privileged to have their asses kicked as well.

Be careful when stepping close to this waterfall, my heroes got stuck and I had to reload

Damn it! I thought I took care of all "sticky" places. Thanks for pointing that out!

Edit: Found hidden wall with bow behind it and also money hidden by poor Goblin with slipped trousers ;p . Wonder what are the other secrets.

Lol, seems like hidden gold pile is not that well hidden. Not the first time hearing it was spotted....

Oh there are more! One common secret wall somewhere near the start location as well as one secret wall with artifact stashed inside. Last one is not quite obvious. Plus there is whole secret room somewhere in the castle area. In order to get there, one must grab couple of certain scrolls from the library.

[uhm]

Thanks! You probably mean artifacts, cuz GM skills are quite harmless: identity item/monster, repair.

Aaah, I see, I thought my party was so strong because of their skills, but thats probably because of good weaponry Next time I will try only with a basic clubs

Okay, it looks like I have found the remaining two hidden walls: one with slippers and second one with belt, very tricky, but wizard eye betrayed the second wall And hidden room, with chest with very sexy crossbow inside Scrolls were useful indeed

[neutonm]

Thanks! You probably mean artifacts, cuz GM skills are quite harmless: identity item/monster, repair.

Aaah, I see, I thought my party was so strong because of their skills, but thats probably because of good weaponry Next time I will try only with a basic clubs

Okay, it looks like I have found the remaining two hidden walls: one with slippers and second one with belt, very tricky, but wizard eye betrayed the second wall And hidden room, with chest with very sexy crossbow inside Scrolls were useful indeed

Yep. It is by design. Of course, the dungeon will be heavily balanced when another demo pops. The good weaponry is for the fun!

Congratulations! I think you'll the first one with such achievement. This inspires to put more secrets and hide them well

[neutonm]

New progress towards MM7 Custom mod:


PS: Thanks for pinpointing this topic, mod!

[vladimir-maestro]

very good job!

[Strobe]

Do you think it is possible to add Vori Island, as it is in the lore of MM7?
And also some quest, even include some quest in the main questline.

https://mightandmagic.fandom.com/wiki/Vori

It would be so freakin cool! Btw, amazing mod already!

[Tomsod]

Adding Vori has been a dream of the fanbase for 20 years now, but it would most likely require more than 3D modeling - you'd need ice-themed textures, sprites, and even monsters, which none of the three games have (although Crystal Guardians at least can be recolored as ice golems, so that's something). In other words, it would require a lot of effort by a good graphics artist like Maestro above, and such people are rare nowadays. I'd give a limb for Vori to happen, but knowing our community's luck with massive collaborative projects, I don't see it happening.

[Echo]

Great to see some new mod in the works, will be keeping an eye on it whenever I drop by. Good luck!