Free Heroes 2 Enhanced

[{CH}ArticleBot]

A relatively young and stabe program is F2HE. First seen release is from Dec 9, 2017 and from that time, they made it into the stable version. The Free Heroes 2 Enhanced engine is created with use of SDL but, of course, you are still supposed to have the original Heroes II. bought.

You can download the windows build from here. Quite extensive explanation of what are changes vs original engine, can be found on the program homepage here. Scroll a bit down to see it.

By itself the Windows version is bundled with demo of Heroes 2 but you can copy your files (DATA/*.agg, MUSIC/*.mp2, /MAPS and original exe.) here and you will get PoL under Free Heroes2 Enhanced engine.

From my (actually short) test time, everything seems to be in place. Oh, just before the start configure the game via "FH2Lanucher.exe" and you can start it by "FHeroes2Enh.exe".

Don't forget to "Save the Config". And when the program first time load all your maps, it will take awhile.

It can do Quick Combat, use spacebar and h key for moving and selecting your heroes. Supports resolutions 4:3 up to 1920 x 1080. See screenies below:


Map Editor is not in the scope of FH2E. If you would like to have a better one you will need to wait for our next article.

I think that you may be pleasantly surprised here.
Read full article...

[BB Shockwave]

What is actually enhanced in this? The graphics? New keybindings? I was only aware about the tablet version of HOMM2

[Pol]

They added Quick combat, optimized keybinding, reduced boarding penalty, speed it up and cleaned UI. So a lot, it's a new engine not a mod.

On page they have:

Features:

• Buying buildings with one click?
• Upgrade units with one click if you have resources
• Last saved file is put on top of "Load" list (files are sorted by time, not name)
• An installer that will also download the Heroes 2 Demo or extra maps to not look for them how to copy (only on Windows now)
• Quick combat to avoid tedious battles. If the QuickCombat results are not perfect, you can replay the battle
• Performance improvements over Free Heroes 2. Especially when "end-turn", in my testing is around 3-4 times quicker
• Many UI fixes
• Game balance fixes: going to a boat will not drain all movement points (but it will dran many). This matches more with Heroes 6-7 gameplay, but is nicer like this. The same is with digging for treasures

[ciplogic]

What is actually enhanced in this? The graphics? New keybindings? I was only aware about the tablet version of HOMM2

Historically this is a fork of FreeHeroes 2 from SourceForge (who is credited in the "Credits" dialog) as is the Tablet(Phone) version of Homm2.

Basically the tablet version is maintained by a guy named Bogdan (who is a game developer), and for I (aka ciplogic, the maintainer of the FH2Enh fork) tried to develop on Windows environment (as the original source code would not compile on Visual Studio compiler, but only on MinGW).

At least the main points addressed were answering with the question to me: "if I would play a cartoonish graphics Heroes, what would annoy me first when I would play it?" and I fixed these items. And I can say there are few things that I did better than the original FH2 (which I am forked on): I fixed every crash I could reproduce in my testing, and all issues that are not solved are because I wasn't able to reproduce (i.e. some person has a crash on Debian, but I could build it on Ubuntu). Also I added a maps downloader/configurator (I plan to rewrite it with Java, to run on MacOS/Linux, right now is C#/Windows only).

A secondary question addressed is this one: if I am a "modern" C++ developer, which tools can I use? So the FH2E uses CMake/Visual Studio as a build system and it will open either in JetBrains' CLion or VS 2017/2019. The code is more modern in the sense of using as much as possible auto-managed objects (aka smart-pointers) and std::strings so less potential crashes are possible.

I would still want to do a few more improvements, but some of them are not that trivial.

An outstanding issue I don't know how to solve yet: graphics are incredibly slow (I am a C# programmer by trade) especially on big resolutions.

[Bandobras Took]

Just to be sure I understand:

The idea is to

1) Install this;
2) Copy over relevant data from your existing H2 install; and then
3) Play on the new engine?

(Does anything need to be copied from the disc itself?)

[Pol]

@Bandobras Took
Yes

When you install it first, it comes with Heroes 2 Demo - so you essentially need to replace its data with full version. And then you can play.

[ciplogic]

Just to be sure I understand:

The idea is to

1) Install this;
2) Copy over relevant data from your existing H2 install; and then
3) Play on the new engine?

(Does anything need to be copied from the disc itself?)

If you use Windows release, you will be able just to download the "launcher" which will download for to you the minimal assets (it will download for you original Heroes2 Demo).

Few things are not optimal on the launcher, but bug reports or bug fixes are welcome!