Might and Magic Heroes SoD Dark Screen issue

[Mirez]

It's a pitty really, my RX5700 should easily be able to run this game without any issues. Oddly enough I had no issues when I was using an Radeon HD6670. I guess I could switch it back in if I want to play the game badly enough...

[Blake]

It's a pitty really, my RX5700 should easily be able to run this game without any issues. Oddly enough I had no issues when I was using an Radeon HD6670. I guess I could switch it back in if I want to play the game badly enough...

Yeah that's what worries me. I'll finally spend the money and get a powerful new graphics card and then all the other issues people have been reporting that I haven't been getting will appear lol. I'll be left with a choice between the darkened map bug on the onboard graphics or those black screen bugs with the 3D dedicated graphics card haha. Oh well only one way to find out so I'll get to it eventually when I'm done with my retro gaming activities.

[braz_steam]

Here is a fix:
I'm using modern system, 12th gen i5 12400F and AMD RX 6600

Dark screens are gone when you add these dll's to main game folder (where your exe is located)
-> https://fdossena.com/index.php?p=wined3d/index.frag

I tried dgVoodoo as well but it did not work, wined3d is Heroes VI savior!

All of the expansions work without issues (no dark screen issues anymore)...

[Blake]

Didn't work for me...

When I extract all the files into my HoMM6 install folder and run the game I get an error msg saying "The procedure entry point D3DKMTOpenAdapterFromLuid could not be located in the dynamic link library gdi32.dll", soon as I remove them again the game runs.

However I'm probably not the best test case lol as I'm not using a modern system and I'm still rocking the lousy integrated intel graphics.. plus I wasn't suffering the black screen bug, I was suffering the darkened map bug in SoD.

[Pol]

HoMM6? I don't think that is intended for it, this is fix for DX 1-7. Won't do anything for DX 8 and above, HoMM6 is using DX 9.0c.

[braz_steam]

HoMM6? I don't think that is intended for it, this is fix for DX 1-7. Won't do anything for DX 8 and above, HoMM6 is using DX 9.0c.

Actually, you're not right.
There is support for up to DX11.
And it did resolve the issue for me on modern GPU.
Finished all expansions and main campaign yesterday, without any dark screen issues.

....
WineD3D For Windows is a DirectX 1-11 to OpenGL wrapper based on WineD3D, which is an almost full implementation of DirectX used in Wine.
Even if Windows supports DirectX natively, using WineD3D can enhance backwards compatiblity with older games, especially on Windows 8 and newer that don't support 16 bit screen modes. Another possible use is to emulate unsupported versions of DirectX, or porting DirectX applications to OpenGL without having to rewrite the rendering code.
Please note that WineD3D is far from perfect, and many games will not work.
....

[Pol]

HoMM6? I don't think that is intended for it, this is fix for DX 1-7. Won't do anything for DX 8 and above, HoMM6 is using DX 9.0c.

Actually, you're not right.
There is support for up to DX11.
And it did resolve the issue for me on modern GPU.
Finished all expansions and main campaign yesterday, without any dark screen issues.

....
WineD3D For Windows is a DirectX 1-11 to OpenGL wrapper based on WineD3D, which is an almost full implementation of DirectX used in Wine.
Even if Windows supports DirectX natively, using WineD3D can enhance backwards compatiblity with older games, especially on Windows 8 and newer that don't support 16 bit screen modes. Another possible use is to emulate unsupported versions of DirectX, or porting DirectX applications to OpenGL without having to rewrite the rendering code.
Please note that WineD3D is far from perfect, and many games will not work.
....

Good news!

[Blake]

https://github.com/doitsujin/dxvk/releases

OH MY GOD.. as previously posted Braz's wined3d fix didn't work for me and someone on steam said the same thing but that DXVK worked for them instead, so I gave DXVK a shot and it actually WORKED for me too. None of the solutions ever posted in all the H6 darkness bug threads have ever worked for me with my old built-in Intel HD 4600 graphics chip and quite frankly I didn't really expect them to as it's a lousy GPU and I've had years of people telling me it's my fault not ubisoft's, that the main game works perfectly fine but the expansion & DLC content doesn't as the addons used some new extra wizbang fancy graphical stuff that's not possible etc pfft..

So I went to test this one thinking yeah yeah here we go again.. but noticed that DXVK supports Intel GPUs as well as AMDs and thought "maaaybee this will be the one" and sure enough... after extracting the DXVK files into my Heroes 6 install folder I loaded the Shadows of Darkness campaign which has always been unplayable due to the darkness bug and it WORKS!.. a friggin decade later on my useless ancient PC with a cr*ppy built-in Intel graphics chip and Heroes 6 addon content is now looking/working perfectly fine with no darkness issue.. AMAZING!

Just typical that the game is finally fixed for me right before the servers go offline haha.. hell I can't even connect to the servers now it would seem (keep getting errors) but oh well... I'm so happy this bloody stupid idiotic lazy ass unfinished game issue is finally solved by clever fans proving that it was just a silly bug that never got fixed and not a limitation of Intel and AMD chips.

I should also say I had to spend 2 hours overcoming a whole other issue with the Ubisoft Connect launcher no longer working due to me still using Win7 (yeah yeah I know, I'll update eventually lol) but thankfully found a fix for that too.

[Julieboyle]

After completing the first dungeon campaign, I opted to continue to the second one, only to encounter an everlasting black screen. Has anyone else experienced this issue?

[Pol]

If you talk about Heroes 6, then yes. Solution is either to disable videos or to switch the game to windowed mode. Check our forums on exact "how to".

Or to apply the fix just a few posts above.

As the reason is incompatibility in video player.