Heroes of Might and Magic Civ2 & ToT scenarios development

[Metro Polis]

Here are the first results:
I tried to keep to your ideas, even though I've got other (better, he, he) plans. You invented a seventh resource (coal?) and there are graphics that don't fit well with their background, because the colours are too similar (I tried to highlighten them, though). We don't have as many bonuses (is that the right plural form?) as you might think, I'll tell you later. We don't need airports, we'll turn the flying untis into helicopters, which lose strength the further they get (might be great not to let the dragons be paramount after all). Actually we lack a terrain, the coastal sand - we can use it just for the shore or have the hill replaced by it and add the hills to the mountain region or whatever.

It is not finished yet, but I am more than half-way through with terrain1. The terrain2 (forest, hill, mountain, river, coast overlay) file is completely blank and just there for the reason not to interfere with first test on terrain1 (which isn't finished either). I think there are too many mines in our resources tiles and suggest to keep the mines strictly to the hills/mountain region. We could just show a pile of resources and when the player orders a settler unit to mine, the cart itself will be drawn on the map in a manner that it actually looks like full of resources. Thus we could use some of the tiles (which are now blocked by mines) to show further bonus pics.

Here's the zipped terrain1 and 2 file. Make sure you copy both into the right folder, terrain2 is and has to be blank for the testing.

 

[Blake00]

Wow!!!! Nice work mate!

Here's a shot of my Barbarian savegame using your test files. Once there's trees and mountains and stuff it's gonna look so epic.

 

[Blake00]

Done! Lots of goodies for you my friend. Hopefully you like them @Metro Polis !

Firstly I have done the city buildings! All icons have been replaced with HoMM2 ones. In many cases I was able to keep the original Civ2 building name because that actual building existed in HoMM2 (Eg Cathedral, Marketplace, Library, Colosseum etc), in some cases I found a HoMM2 building image that fit the appearance of the Civ 2 building name so I didn't change the wording on them either (eg Barracks, Temple etc), in other cases I needed to rename the building entirely and select an appropriate picture and name for the bonus it gave (eg Waterfall, Well, Foundry etc), and finally in some cases I couldn't find a HoMM2 building equivalent so I found some good stuff in the Succession Wars HoMM2 mod for HoMM3 (eg Capital, Granary, Captains Quarters, Shipyard etc) which has lots of cool new stuff but with a HoMM2 art style. Some of these conversion names/ideas I really struggled with so you may have some better suggestions haha. Oh and obviously I've made all these changes with the assumption that we're not messing with building functionality (city walls still makes walls, banks still makes money etc) and leaving them as default civ2 all still doing what they normally do. If you've already got a RULES.TXT file then only take the city building names from my copy as I've changed nothing else in the file.

Building Icons
(Do NOT import this example pic as everything is double sized, use attached ICONS.GIF file instead)

Building Name Changes
(Do NOT import these names as it may screw formatting, use attached RULES.TXT file instead)
Nothing - Nothing
Palace - Capital
Barracks - Barracks
Granary - Granary
Temple - Temple
MarketPlace - MarketPlace
Library - Library
Courthouse - Courthouse
City Walls - Fortifications
Aqueduct - Waterfall
Bank - Statue
Cathedral - Cathedral
University - Mage Guild
Mass Transit - Treehouse
Colosseum - Colosseum
Factory - Foundry
Manufacturing Plant - Upg. Foundry
SDI Defense - Magic Shield
Recycling Center - Garbage Heap
Power Plant - Cave Mine
Hydro Plant - Bridge Dam
Nuclear Plant - Storm Energy
Stock Exchange - Dungeon Keep
Sewer System - Well
Supermarket - Farms
Superhighways - Stonehenge
Research Lab - Laboratory
SAM Missile Battery - Left Turret
Coastal Fortress - Right Turret
Solar Plant - Magic Pyramid
Harbor - Harbor
Offshore Platform - Upg. Harbor
Airport - Cliff Nest
Police Station - Captain's Quarters
Port Facility - Shipyard
SS Structural - SS Structural
SS Component - SS Component
SS Module - SS Module
(Capitalization) - (Trade Goods)

Interface Changes
I've also done experiments with the GUI interface. Obviously there's a reason why most mods don't mess with it because the whole interface is made out of tiny pictures replicated in a tile formation. Meaning anything cool or detailed looks cr*p lol! However I've come up with something you'll hopefully like! I took bits of the 'Good guy' interface from HoMM2 and played with them (increasing the ivy amount to counter some of the uglyness on the replicated side screen vertical GUI parts) and put them in the window heading background area. I then also changed the 'gravel pattern' window background colours to match the window heading colours.

Unexplored Areas Black Shroud
I also went into the TERRAIN1.GIF file you gave me and changed the black shroud to the HoMM2 star lights shroud for unexplored areas. Obviously you've made many changes to your TERRAIN1.GIF file since sending me a copy so just grab this below highlighted bit from the attached TERRAIN1.GIF file at the bottom of the post.

(Do NOT import this example pic as everything is double sized, use attached TERRAIN1.GIF file instead)

Final Results
Here's an in-game test pic showing the GUI changes, the starlight shroud, and you'll see a few of the new buildings in action too.

 

[Metro Polis]

Uh-oh, looks great, so cool! I sent a message to the guys working on the Succession Wars Mod and asked wether they would share their graphics on mountains, hills and forests. For that is the hardest thing to design and I still haven't started working on those. I plan to do the forest and river tiles this weekend. And maybe a .dll file for the in-game pop-up graphics, too.

I like the renamed buildings, my favourite being: Recycling Center - Garbage Heap

 

[Metro Polis]

An updated screenshot (mountains and hills actually). No forests or rivers so far.

Maybe we won't need the guys from Succession War after all.

 

[Blake00]

omg that looks so f*cking good!!!

I like the renamed buildings, my favourite being: Recycling Center - Garbage Heap

Haha yeah I was like "wtf in HoMM has anything to do with a Recycling Center??" Then I saw the goblin garbage heap and thought "SCORE!" haha. Cause dumping all your garbage in 1 spot totally reduces pollution right?

.

 

[Metro Polis]

I've got an idea on how to apply irrigation (looks like that small magic well that restored your hero's spell points) and the farmland (which is a hut). For the road, too: do you remember those magical fields, sparkling with magic (or was it actually anti-magic?) or maybe a very small symbol for the mass haste spell or maybe simply HoMM's road sign. And then! Then we could the cool homm2 roads for the river tiles. Don't know exactly what that will look like, but I think it would be way better to not have the terrain files ruined by primitive lines which turn into an ugly net in the end.

 

[Blake00]

I've got an idea on how to apply irrigation (looks like that small magic well that restored your hero's spell points) and the farmland (which is a hut). For the road, too: do you remember those magical fields, sparkling with magic (or was it actually anti-magic?) or maybe a very small symbol for the mass haste spell or maybe simply HoMM's road sign. And then! Then we could the cool homm2 roads for the river tiles. Don't know exactly what that will look like, but I think it would be way better to not have the terrain files ruined by primitive lines which turn into an ugly net in the end.

Ahh I was literally working on a irrigation and farmland graphic for you today. If you're already doing stuff with them I'll stop.

 

[Blake00]

I changed my mind haha.. I was nearly done so screw it, I'll post them here.. I too had come up with the idea of putting little houses in them haha.

I took the farmland from ToT Midgard/Fantasy, made it more transparent (otherwise you can't see what terrain is underneath) and stuck a little HoMM2 Peasant house with its smoking chimney in there between the walls.

Irrigation did not look good on our dark grassland so I took one of the good fan made ones from that TERRAIN1.GIF collection you gave me that has some cool little bits of farmland, and made the blue water much lighter and I added another little HoMM2 peasant house too haha.

Using a well from the map instead of a house is good idea so what you've come up with may look better but never the less here's what I came up with if it helps you do yours.

Farms Test
(Do NOT import this example pic as everything is double sized, use attached TERRAIN1.GIF file instead)

 

[Blake00]

SUCCESS! Using the HoMM resource viewer and extraction program I was able to extract EVERY sound in HoMM2! Map building sounds, spell sounds, and of course the all import unit battle sounds. All in usable WAV format. We're now spoiled for choice haha!

I've zipped and attached the entire extraction below.

 

[Blake00]

Our scenario can now have music! I've put together a playlist of HoMM2 midis using 2 different popular playlist file formats. All people will have to do is turn off Civ2's regular music and then just double click on the media playlist.

I've been play testing the tracks while working on stuff for this scenario and the music really takes you right back to the 90s and gets those HoMM creative juices flowing haha.

@Metro Polis just extract the contents of this 7ip into your WIP scenario folder and it will create a music folder in there and add the playlist links to play the music. I've created playlist files in the music folder itself and also in what will be the scenario root folder so its easy for people to find. There's 45 minutes of awesome HoMM2 music and and all of this takes up like a measly 200 kilobytes haha. Kind of surprised more people didn't do midi music for their scenarios back in the day when we were all rocking dialup modem internet lol.

 

[Metro Polis]

This is an updated screenshot of a random map. Terrain2 is optimized, I guess. I found out that you can integrate some additional graphics in the river mouth tiles, which I have never seen used that way before and was unknown to me until yesterday, too. Stonehenge is included, too, as the solo river tile, but unfortunately that random terrain doesn't appear very often and is also not to be seen in this screenshot.

Terrain1 is nearly finished, too, unless we want to highlight the roads a little bit more (the sparks around Washington can easily be overlooked), include the railroad tiles for bonus graphics in scenarioes or do slight changes here and there on some of the ressources.

Maybe it's high time to move on and take the next step: the units.gif. Do you see the wagon in the screenshot? It's the HOMM2 skill graphics for the logistics. I have to re-do its wheels, though.

I also had a quite radical idea to actually turn the heroes into settlers, who use magic to create roads, wells, villages and mines and have to be protected by their troops. What do you think about that?

 

[Blake00]

This is truly incredible mate! Looks so darn good!!!! I can't stop looking at this pic haha!

That settler is awesome! I was gonna try to find a good settler wagon but you've managed to find one in HoMM2 itself haha.

Admittedly I didn't even see the sparkle roads until you mentioned them so yeah they prob need a bit more work. Once all is finished I'm actually thinking of create an alternative irrigation/farmland/roads mod for this so people can just choose which one they want. Eg a pure HoMM way or a Civ2 way.

That's a very interesting idea about the hero settler. I hadn't thought of that. Will discuss over PM since you've asked me there too.

 

[Blake00]

Am working on cities at the moment and figured I'd post my progress here for others to see..

HoMM games only has 1 town and castle image to dictate city size/development so we're using the town for the un-walled cities and the castle for the walled cities in the scenario. The other BIG problem is that the original images are much higher resolution and are very vertically tall in HoMM2 which means to fit them into a short and wide city cell in Civ2 they have to be shrunk so much that they look way too small (eg see Metropolis's old 2014 shots) so we're trying using a combination of stretching and pixel editing (mostly the big towers and tall walls) to full utilize every pixel of width and height in the Civ2 city cell.

Eg I have to somehow squeeze this (actual 1 to 1 size)

into the pink area in this little thing (actual 1 to 1 size)

I can go over the grey areas above but NOT below the diamond isometric cell.

Here's the first one done.. viewers will notice many other interesting things in this little photo as @Metro Polis has done some AMAZING work with the terrains and I've been playing around with them a little bit too..

WARLOCK

 

[Blake00]

This castle was a NIGHTMARE as I had to change the shape of the walls to fit in the cell.. still not thrilled about the skull and other stuff so will probably get revisions, or @Metro Polis may wanna take a pass at it later.

Necromancer

 

[Blake00]

This one ended up being rather easy compared to the last 2. Guess I'm learning from dealing with the past problems haha. Like with the other 2 the windows and city buildings were horribly distorted by the downsize requiring me to repaint them in. And also much like with the others the castle wall and village fence is completely repainted and reshaped to fit the Civ2 cell limits and remove downsize distortions.

Sorceress

 

[Blake00]

This was one tougher than I thought as I quickly realised that the brick pattern on the walls (which was destroyed in the shrinking/downsizing) was also all over the castle so I had repaint the bricks all over the whole bloody thing lol.

Those with a keen eye will see I've played around with the forts a bit more too. @Metro Polis has also smoothed out the beach shore lines a bit.

Knight

 

[Blake00]

Another one down.. one to go!

This one took longer than I wanted as well, as the village had an annoying crisscross fence that trying to do a miniature version of on an angle was hell haha.

Barbarian

 

[Blake00]

FINISHED! Boy am I glad that's over lol. Took me days..

Wizard

 

[Metro Polis]

But it was worth it, wasn't it?