The Heroes 4 Restoration of Axeoth project has had a lot of movement lately. Here’s a list of some of what we’ve been up to. Make sure you read until the end for a surprise discovery!

• New team member: ByteBandit!
• Heroes IV Chronicles
• H3->H4 conversion feature
• Unity update
• Every Dog Has His Day
• Something special, super secret, just recently uncovered by Jonny!

 First I would like to welcome our newest member to the team: ByteBandit! His name is probably recognizable, as he has been on the HoMM scene for quite a while! 

ByteBandit is currently working on a few things:

• Translating non-English maps to English
• Heroes IV Chronicles 

What is Heroes IV Chronicles? It’s a faithful port of the Heroes Chronicles series to Heroes of Might and Magic IV! This is something very near and dear to my heart, as the HoMM series came alive for me like never before when I played them. Long live Tarnum! 

Currently we have the first, second, and third maps of Warlords of the Wastelands completed, with the fourth map in progress. He has been painting terrain and placing objects simply by approximating the locations from the Heroes 3 map onto the Heroes 4 map. That’s a lot of work! 

Fortunately, there is a new feature being worked on for the Advanced Options Map Editor: Heroes 3 map -> Heroes 4 map conversion. The plan for this feature is just like it sounds, to convert a Heroes of Might and Magic 3 map into a Heroes of Might and Magic 4 map. Big thanks to HeroesCommunity member RoseKavalier for finding a Java library that can parse Heroes 3 maps.

At the moment, the Advanced Options Map Editor is able to open a Heroes 3 map, convert the terrain, and add it to a new Heroes 4 Map.

The next step will be to start converting objects from H3 -> H4. This part is a little tricky, and we could use some help. If you are interested in helping us map H3 object types to H4 object types, please send me (iLiVeInAbOx05) a pm, or let me know in the Advanced Options Map Editor thread.

Update on the Unity Campaign port.

Anyone that remembers the Unity project probably thinks it is dead and gone by now. Well, that’s certainly not the case and work still progresses on it! 

Just a quick summary for anyone that doesn’t know about this port: Unity (and Every Dog Has His Day) are the never released campaigns written by Terry Ray for Heroes 4. Marzhin was able to release a version of these maps for Heroes 7, and was kind enough to release the actual Terry Ray scripts to the community. (See this thread for more details)

Back to the update!

The first map, The Isle of Order, is completed (though I do want to go back and change a few things). The writing and landscaping for the Isle of Life are complete, with a good amount of scripting done as well. The writing for the Isle of Nature is complete. Ideas for the spells on the Isles of Chaos and Death have been written out, so all that needs to be done is expanding them to actual story texts. Then we just need the landscaping for the remaining three maps. 

Update on the Every Dog Has His Day port. 

Wait, update? There was never any news that the port for Every Dog Has His Day had even begun. 

Well, it has.. and it’s actually finished.. That’s right, the campaign is done! Here are a couple screenshots of the start of the campaign below.

So, how is it that we were able to port Every Dog Has His Day so fast? Well, that’s the super secret discovery made by Jonny.

We were discussing the best way to move forward with the Dogwoggle campaign, specifically where each of the campaign maps should fall on the world map, when Jonny decided to take a look at the TGS Dogwoggle campaign.

He quickly noticed that each of the TGS Dogwoggle campaign maps actually already fit on the world map.. So wait a second, but maybe he needed to look even closer? 

Next Jonny noticed that the Terry Ray script for Every Dog Has His Day actually matched everything you see in the first map of the TGS version.

The more he looked through the maps, the more he realized that the TGS version was, in fact, a reconceptualized Terry Ray Every Dog Has His Day campaign!

Note. There were of course some small differences, as the campaign needed to be molded to the current incarnation of the TGS Dogwoggle campaign. 

But, if that’s not enough to convince you, maybe this will. Below is an image of the TGS Dogwoggle campaign’s first map underground, with the cave shroud removed.

The terrain you see there was already in place! They were working on the area on Antagarich following the clash of Armageddon’s Blade and the Sword of Frost, where Dogwoggle makes his way to one of the portals. They then cut the Terry Ray version of the campaign, covered the underground with cave, and left the current small starting area for the TGS campaign!

What does this mean? We’ve actually had the Every Dog Has His Day campaign all along, just not with the Terry Ray script. 

Jonny did his thing and made all the necessary updates, including getting the Terry Ray script added so that we can actually have the real thing! 

When will we be releasing it? Not quite yet. Since most people have played the Dogwoggle campaign already, we wanted to add some flavor to the maps. Take another look at the two campaign images above again to see what I mean. 

There will also be a purist version of the campaign, without the enhancements for those that want exactly what NWC would have released.

The way we plan to release both Unity and Every Dog Has His Day is so that they will override the Masters of Magic and Might Makes Right campaigns, respectively, making them playable via the TGS campaign selection. 

That’s it for the project update! If anyone is interested in helping out in anyway, even just helping play-test the maps and campaigns, please let me know!

Thanks for reading!
- iLiVeInAbOx05