Man how has it already been 6mths lol! Guess I better get that
Heroes of Might & Magic 1 Addon released soon lol! It's all done and I'm just finishing up the bug testing and documentation on it so it should be ready very soon.
But for now let's talk about what this HoMM1 themed addon changes in the Heroes of Might & Magic 2 mod.
Years ago I talked with
@Metro Polis about doing a special Heroes of Might & Magic 1 addon for our HoMM2 mod that converts most of the graphics to HoMM1 style. We sort of laughed it off as something I'll probably never get to, however late last year when I was 'in the zone' finishing up the HoMM2 mod I decided to go for it and do the HoMM1 addon too. As previously posted in this thread I started with the hardest job and imported and converted the HoMM1 towns and castles into Civ2 which was quite the challenge as the original assets are more than 3x the height & 2x the width of the Civ2 city sprite box meaning a lot of downsizing and repainting is requiring if you want that sharp 'pixel perfect' look instead of a blurred/stretched auto downsize. I converted all the
original HoMM2 towns and castles into our mod waaaaaay back in 2019 so I was super rusty with these tricks and it's not perfect but I'm pretty happy with the final result.
Next I imported all of Heroes of Might & Magic 1's units into the game. HoMM1 only has 4 factions versus HoMM2's 6 factions so I thought about removing the extra ones but it would have mucked up a lot of the scenario's balancing and needed a new map designed which I felt was a bridge too far for a small addon that most people probably won't play. So apologies to HoMM1 purists haha, you'll still be a seeing some HoMM2 stuff in your game (grayed out below for display purposes).
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After that all that was left to finish the conversion of the game world was terrain! I was a little bit worried how I'd go as Metropolis did all the terrain conversion work for our HoMM2 mod but I've done so much terrain work in my other mods over the years since that I figured I'd go okay and sure enough it's gone pretty well. Most terrains and special resources have been replaced with HoMM1 equivalents although I left the hills, mountains and coasts as they are as that's a lot of extra work for pretty minor differences. Things still didn't look different enough so I decided to build up a new forest set and studied how Metro did his in 2019. Basically he took a similar autumn forest set from Civ2 (from the Master of Magic scenario) and pasted HoMM2 autumn trees over the top until you could barely see the Civ2 forest underneath but because it was still there it created the illusion of a dense forest look (without him having to paste hundreds of HoMM2 trees on top of one another). So I went hunting and found a nice pine tree forest (in Captain Nemo's Nemoland terrain tile set) and covered them in pine trees from HoMM1. Ironically both HoMM1 & HoMM2 use both tree types anyway so perhaps in the later Test of Time version I'll use the extra terrain slots to have both forest types in the game, but for now they illustrate the visual difference between the HoMM2 and HoMM1 addon nicely. Here's some comparison shots below showing the new terrain, units and cities in game...
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With the game world sorted I decided to throw in a few of the usual extra bells and whistles too and look at messing with the cutscenes, main menu, and GUI...
Heroes of Might & Magic 1 doesn't have many cutscenes so I've left most of our HoMM2 themed videos files (eg wonders, dragon launch, diplomacy heralds, and high council advisors) as they were however I couldn't resist changing the intro and death videos as HoMM1's intro has lots of nostalgic goodness and it's guillotine death sequence was perfect for your death in Civ2 as well. The scenes take a quality hit due to Civ2's lower video quality but nevertheless they play nicely in the game and I may do higher resolution & quality conversions for a Test of Time version one day.
Naturally I could't resist designing a nice big and colourful 1080P HoMM1 themed Civ2 main menu replacement similar to what I did for the HoMM2 mod. All start new game window images have been replaced too.
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Of course if I'm going to replace the intro DLL images then I'm obviously going to replace all the advisor ones too. Once again I was very hampered by HoMM1's lack of cutscenes so I had to use a lot of in-game shots of castles and battles to get the job done. I probably should have darkened them a bit more for readability but man I love these images haha.
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Lastly I've replaced all city screen backgrounds, city buildings and those with a keen eye looking at the last few pictures will have also noticed that I've done a new custom GUI using the gold jewels and snake wood theme from HoMM1's GUI too. So here's a big promotional shot showing all that off too.
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For those that want to see it all in action I do a quick tour of the HoMM1 addon at the
35:45 mark of my original Heroes of Might & Magic 2 tour video here...
Finally those wondering about the aforementioned enhanced HoMM2 mod
Test of Time conversion work, well my priority at the moment is to finish and release the last of my planned MGE mods and videos first, however I have done some more preliminary work. As previously posted I've already converted the custom GUI over to ToT, Gaeptit has kindly helped me with the scenario files conversion work, and I recently converted the city buildings across. This was quite a bit of work as I did the original city buildings in 2019 so I had to find all the source images again or make my own new ones and take zero shortcuts this time due to doing them in much high resolutions however the results speak for themselves and the higher res higher colour city buildings in ToT look gooooood.
Original MGE building icons:
New ToT building icons:
And some of the big ToT Civilopedia building images: