fheroes2: Resurrection

[cuthalion]

Thanks for the great work, I cannot be greatful enough - Heroes 2 was my favourite game in my childhood.
A question regarding modding.
Back in my days, I spent quite some time on hex-editing Heroes 2 to make balancing adjustments (that I thought would fit) so that heroes, units and building were useful, not too strong or weak, not to expensive or cheap etc.
I wonder if these Heroes-II can be modded this way too? I mean, I am sure they can. Just curious if it is user-friendly

[cuthalion]

OK, I found source code, and I remember good old C so I think I could manage with it. Just need to figure out which is the most newbie-friendly tool to build it: been out of programming practice for decades...

[sirDranik]

OK, I found source code, and I remember good old C so I think I could manage with it. Just need to figure out which is the most newbie-friendly tool to build it: been out of programming practice for decades...

Hi. Since fheroes2 is an open reimplementation of game engine - all values of the existing mechanics or stats could be easily changed. In future we're planning to expand modding capabilities and make it user friendly. Also, on the basis of fheroes2 engine we're going to release our separate expansion, which would bring new experience into Heroes2 game.

[Blake]

Also, on the basis of fheroes2 engine we're going to release our separate expansion, which would bring new experience into Heroes2 game.

That is going to be mind blowing. Are you guys planning on doing any custom story/intro cutscenes for your campaign or is that a bridge too far?

[sirDranik]

Also, on the basis of fheroes2 engine we're going to release our separate expansion, which would bring new experience into Heroes2 game.

That is going to be mind blowing. Are you guys planning on doing any custom story/intro cutscenes for your campaign or is that a bridge too far?

Yes, we are. New expansion is nothing without new campaign. So we're going to tell new story and introduce new content during campaign walkthrough. Cutscenes will be added, for sure, since it's the only way of diving into a story.

[cuthalion]

A question on random number generator.
So, I modified sources for mage heroes to have better chances of gaining as and ds during level up.
E.g., for sorceress I replaced {10,10,30,50} with {35,10,25,30} - because of initial 0-0-2-3 and 45-55 balance towards mage skills I supposed she would still be a mage, but with stronger combat chances.
In first scenario, my sorceress gained 10th level, and of 9 level ups she had 8 attack skill and 1 knowledge - an impossible figure, not merely an unlikely one - if I understand values in game_static.cpp correctly. I wonder if there is something strange with RNG or do I misinterpret code?
Thank you.

[sirDranik]

Hi, @cuthalion!
I cannot tell exactly the formula right now. But the result you've gained seemed to correspond the values, you set: the highest chance to get attack skill made it possible for RNG to show all its power. Try to make some tests on ~10 heroes at least. The outcome of 8 attack skill could be just your lucky case.

[Blake]

Also, on the basis of fheroes2 engine we're going to release our separate expansion, which would bring new experience into Heroes2 game.

That is going to be mind blowing. Are you guys planning on doing any custom story/intro cutscenes for your campaign or is that a bridge too far?

Yes, we are. New expansion is nothing without new campaign. So we're going to tell new story and introduce new content during campaign walkthrough. Cutscenes will be added, for sure, since it's the only way of diving into a story.

Duuuuuuuude.. man I love you guys haha

[sirDranik]

Dear fans of Heroes of Might and Magic II!

As we promised few days before we are releasing a new version of fheroes2 game engine - 0.9.16. We made huge changes and we are eager to share details about them.

We reworked the whole source code related to audio. The first major change is that specific music tracks resume from the places where they were stopped, exactly how it is in the original game! For now this feature works only for External type of music such as OGG, FLAC and MP3 files, but we will expand it to MIDI tracks in the near future.
Secondly, all surrounding sounds on Adventure map are adjusted for every hero's step instead of being updated once per tile. This brings a gradual change of sounds during hero's walk. We also optimized sound management to be more efficient on low-end machines and removed very rare short sound "peaks". Additionally, the team fixed incorrect sounds for some objects and a small bonus: rocks in water with seagulls now have their own sound. Check them during the game play!

Lastly regarding audio, we added 3D Audio feature for objects on the map. Put your headphones on, walk your hero nearby a river or mine to feel the depth of sound!

Based on the newly added feature the list of options in configuration was changed as well and all audio options are now grouped separately.


AI in this release became much faster and smarter. We significantly improved AI calculations by caching needed data without reducing the complexity of the logic. AI heroes are now aware of special map's conditions: they will attack a castle which is a loss condition for a human player, much more aggressively or defend their hero so it is harder for a player to defeat it.

Our team improved some graphical features of the game. Did you notice that Knight and Wizard castles always have light blue flags? Now these flags have the same color as the owner of the castle.


With the power of the engine we were able to fix Red Tower in Sorceress castle. The original resources contain an image, that lack some parts of the structure.


Not bad for an image being completely generated by the application? Notice the rainbow behind the Tower.

And here is another example where the original resources were incorrect: captain's quarters icon in Sorceress castle.


The team fixed High Scores for campaign, closed many issues with spells, updated multiple existing translations and added Belarusian, Spanish and Swedish languages support.

As usual we fixed more than 40 bugs since the last release.
So do not waste time anymore and download the latest version of the project. We hope that you enjoy the game!

You could also support the project development on Patreon.

[Blake]

Great work guys.

[sirDranik]

Great work guys.

Thank you for support!

[sirDranik]

Dear fans and players of Heroes of Might & Magic 2!

After a month of hard work with some unexpected disruptions in development we are happy to announce a brand new version of fheroes2 - 0.9.17.
This release was focused mainly on audio and AI but not only.

Audio was significantly improved since the previous release. We fixed issues with MIDI music playback delays on Adventure Map, multiple possible crashes with audio synchronization, extra sounds appearance in castle's window and etc. Such cases were very rare but nobody likes a buggy game.
As a bonus Freeman's Foundry now has its own ambient sound on Adventure Map. Walk your hero nearby it to hear!


"Evil" interface finally got some proper attention. In the original game this type of interface was applied only to a limited number of dialogs. We expanded the list and made some windows to have a proper "evil" look.


AI has been greatly enhanced in this release. The team added a new Courier role for AI heroes to focus on supplies delivery for more stronger heroes. AI now is smart enough to use Adventure Spells efficiently and also to estimate the number of needed heroes for the kingdom.
Lastly, AI will defend its castle more aggressively instead of leaving them empty and defenseless.

As per many player requests we added an ability to change hotkeys for in-game events within the game. Now you can set any combinations to improve your gameplay skills.


Besides this the team fixed multiple places with logic on Adventure Map, closed some visual issues with dialogs and improved translation for multiple languages.
As usual we fixed more than 40 bugs since the last release. We hope that you would enjoy the game and thank you very much for your support!

You could also support the project development on Patreon.

[sirDranik]

Dear supporters and fans of Heroes of Might and Magic 2!

Today we are excited to announce a new release of fheroes2 - 0.9.18! This release is a bit unusual in terms of visual representation but it contains a lot of important changes.

The first thing which the team was fixing is audio. As you remember we made significant changes in the code to push audio on the next level. In this release we polished things to make it even better. Windows OS players were facing a lot of issues related to MIDI music: fading sounds, inability to restart songs where they being stopped, or even crashes on Windows 8. We added new sound font package to fix all these issues so you can enjoy music in full power. This applies only for SDL 2 build.

The second thing which closed over 40 bugs is a new rendering system for Adventure Map. Old rendering system was full of issues such as heroes being visible through mountains, boats being rendered over other objects, monsters being seen over fog. Now most of these issues are gone.



This new rendering system allows us to progress towards new map format, in-built map editor and also to easily add new objects on Adventure Map.

We also fixed multiple issues with amount of monsters in objects, their distribution during battle, Diplomacy rules and other small but important logical situations. The team updated Polish, Bulgarian, Russian and Hungarian translations.
We hope that you enjoy this more polished release which is very close to 1.0 release.

You could also support the project development on Patreon.

[Pol]

Great news sirDranik, featured!

[sirDranik]

Great news sirDranik, featured!

Oh, thanks!
The project is in final state. Not so much bugs left.

[sirDranik]

Dear fans of Heroes of Might and Magic 2!

As usual we are presenting a new release of fheroes2 - 0.9.19. In this release we put extra effort to polish some cases of rendering on Adventure Map. Besides this we fixed few issues with Mini-map and also View Towns spell show properly rendered castles.

The release brings a new feature to make the game even more attractive for everyone: an option to auto-finish the battle by instantly bringing results of it from where the player left. This is very useful for battles when the outcome is obvious and you just want to skip a boring part of it. Default hotkey for this is Q.


Army exchange was improved to make the experience more pleasant. You can use arrows in hero meeting dialog to move whole army with a selected stack. Give it a try.

AI was updated as well: the team fixed cases when AI heroes were wandering non-stop around one place, and enhanced artifact evaluation by AI heroes making their strategy more efficient.

The release also brings a major change which would be welcomed by long-time players as well as those who are new to the game. The team added difficulty level for campaigns. You can select between Easy, Normal or Hard. The difference between these modes is in AI behavior. If you feel that a campaign is too hard to complete, you can lower the difficulty and try again.


This change not only adds a new difficulty button but also paves a way for the add-on changes because we added an algorithm to generate any possible buttons without even having resources for the font. It unblocks the work for translation team also. Soon you will see buttons being also translated to other languages.

Besides these changes the team updated translations for multiple languages and made small tweaks in UI to make the game even better.
Thank you very much for your support and contribution! We hope that you enjoy the game!

You could also support the project development on Patreon.

[Blake]

AI difficulty levels in the campaign is super cool.. I often find myself wishing for that in HoMM1 too as the regular level AI in that is pretty bad lol.

[sirDranik]

Dear fans and supporters of Heroes of Might and Magic 2!

It is time to introduce a new version of fheroes2 - 0.9.20. One month has passed and we are happy to share some news about the release.

Translations and corresponding UI saw huge improvements. We added support for Turkish, Dutch and Romanian languages, including not only their translations but font generations for each of them.


Moreover, the fheroes2 engine is now capable of generating new buttons within the game for any language. For now we have updated just a few buttons in the game, but in the future we are going to make it possible to cover all of the buttons for any language within the game.


The AI has improved significantly. The team did an enormous work in fixing various logical issues related to the AI and also some very tricky places which would have been impossible to catch for normal players. This was made possible by a new special debug tool within the engine which allows us to literally see every step of the AI. We also decreased some monster growth perks for the AI, which by the way were also present in the original game, to have more fair conditions for human players and the AI.

The Petrification spell got a brand new icon which was not present in the original game, and this icon was drawn by our pixel artist.



On top of all of this we added a Handicap feature not only for multiplayer as it was in the original game, but also for single-player games to give players more flexibility and an even higher challenge while playing certain maps.


As usual the team fixed more than 30 bugs.

Thank you so much for your support and we hope that you will really enjoy the game!

You could also support the project development on Patreon.

[sirDranik]

AI difficulty levels in the campaign is super cool.. I often find myself wishing for that in HoMM1 too as the regular level AI in that is pretty bad lol.

Well, now it would be even more fun to play campaigns.
AI is going to become really challenging soon.

[sirDranik]

Dear fans of the fheroes2 project and of Heroes of Might and Magic 2!

Fheroes2 Resurrection team introducing a new release of the fheroes2 engine - 0.9.21.
We are happy to tell you that many significant milestones were reached. The list is quite long (as usual) and very diverse, so there should be something interesting for everyone. Here are some highlights that we have selected for you:

First of all, we solved a sound issue that would happen during playback of campaign videos for Windows users. No more audio distortions or crashes.

We added new options for graphics in the main menu settings. Now you can select V-Sync to solve potential screen tearing problems, and display system information like the Frames Per Second (FPS), and toggle full screen mode on or off.


As usual the AI has seen substantial improvements. It will now arrange its troops better and has better priorities for what to do on the adventure map. In addition to this, we expect players who try the final Roland campaign scenario to meet a much greater challenger now - without making any spoilers…

Translations are constantly improving and this release makes it possible to select Czech, Hungarian and Dutch languages. Translations were also improved for Russian, Belarusian, Hungarian, Bulgarian, French and Norwegian. The translations were becoming so many that we had to add a new language selection dialog.


Last but not at all least, we have added an initial Android version! This has long been awaited and thanks to hard work put in by our members this was achieved. We need to emphasize that it is the first version of this and that there are still things left to do to polish the experience to an acceptable quality. Soon we will update our documentation on how to install it and play on your own devices.


As usual, we fixed more than 40 bugs since last release.

We hope that you will enjoy this new release and as always thank you all for your support!

You could also support the project development on Patreon.