Thorvald of Lym
A Little Sketchy
Not with ToTPP there aren't.
Heroes of Might and Magic Civ2 & ToT scenarios development
- Thread starter Skuall
- Start date
Not with ToTPP there aren't.
I've corrected that bit to say MGE. Metro has talked about doing a ToT version one day so if he does, that's good to know that ToTPP allows for more than 6 lol. How many more does it allow??
Metro Polis
Warlord
Ah, sorry man, I have to struggle to even use TOT as I barely touched it. I'll sure as hell not go any further than that.
Well then I guess if a ToT version ever happens it'll be my doing haha. Converting it is easy (especially if Grapetit does it for us haha) however having to redo ALL the graphics in all the dll files.. umm yeah don't hold your breath people lol.
Anyway I just realised that I forgot to put in a city building list into the big 100th post so I've just edited the post and put the list in for people to check out.
https://forums.civfanatics.com/thre...-of-might-and-magic.6127/page-5#post-15754117
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Anyway I just realised that I forgot to put in a city building list into the big 100th post so I've just edited the post and put the list in for people to check out.
https://forums.civfanatics.com/thre...-of-might-and-magic.6127/page-5#post-15754117
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Thorvald of Lym
A Little Sketchy
Vanilla ToT adds a seventh set for a Renaissance-era triggered by the Invention tech. With ToTPP, there are options to define individual city sets for each civ, including barbarians, per map!
Metro Polis
Warlord
Well, I wouldn't pay too much attention to that as there are only six factions in HoMM2. The more you add, the more you drift away.
Yeah.. but that's good for me to know though. As while it probably won't happen (unless heaps of people demand it lol) I've talked with Metro about me making a HoMM1 mod for our scenario one day and then maybe even try making a HoMM3 and HoMM4 version of it too. These later 2 would definitely require a ToT conversion as they were both made in 24bit colour and have higher resolution assets than HoMM1-2. HoMM3 has 9 different factions and so many more units so it would require some serious trickery only ToTPP can give. However I doubt I'll bother though as Tom2050's HoMM3 Civ3 mod is amazing and I'm looking to wind up all my Civ2 projects and move on. I don't wanna take on new ones haha. The HoMM1 mod is more likely as HoMM1 & HoMM2 are so darn similar and it would just be a terrain, city icon & unit pack, and certainly NOT all the dlls and wonder videos haha.
Oh and this is old news now but I've created a ModDB page for this project here:
https://www.moddb.com/mods/civilization-2-heroes-of-might-and-magic-2-mod
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Oh and this is old news now but I've created a ModDB page for this project here:
https://www.moddb.com/mods/civilization-2-heroes-of-might-and-magic-2-mod
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Hey guys,
Time for another update.. a way overdue one! Firstly I must be honest and say that not a huge amount of work has been done on this project since my last post in May last year. 2020 was a rough year for many people and sadly I didn't escape its unpleasantness and had a few setbacks that took an emotional toll on me resulting in months of inactivity on all my projects. However late last year I got back into them and did a truck load of work on my C&C and Red Alert 2 scenarios getting them towards a near release position, and of course also did some work on this project such as finalising the sounds for all the units (and a few other things
), making some more unit special ability balance adjustments, and I also finished work on testing technologies (making sure you can research from start to finish with no glitches) and giving them all custom graphics.
Speaking of technologies that's something we haven't really talked about much so far, so lets do it now. @Metro Polis has painstakingly designed an awesome custom tech tree for this mod where all units, buildings and magical range weapons are obtained via 8 schools of research (mostly inspired by HoMM2 hero secondary skills) with 7 levels in each school. Default Civ2 only has 5 schools however thankfully they have 4 levels with different icons which meant I had access to more than 5 slots allowing me to make the required 8 icons thankfully.
So here’s the final product! Some icons are from the spell tree while other ones are custom ones I made where I cut a hero skill icon out from it's blue marble background and pasted it over a spell scroll background to match the other spell icons. Also the military one is actually a combination of 3 different HoMM2 spell icons!
So where are things at? Well all that's left to do now is creating a map & decorating it, final testing, writing up documentation, and then a tour video. Then it shall be released. But how long you ask..
Hmm well.. I hope I don't regret this as I suck at meeting deadlines and I don’t wanna be one of the endless people making false promises on this forum about their projects lol, but I believe now I'm at a stage with all my projects that I can say that this project will be finished and released within the next 3 months. If I fail to meet this deadline you can all kick my ass lol.
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Time for another update.. a way overdue one! Firstly I must be honest and say that not a huge amount of work has been done on this project since my last post in May last year. 2020 was a rough year for many people and sadly I didn't escape its unpleasantness and had a few setbacks that took an emotional toll on me resulting in months of inactivity on all my projects. However late last year I got back into them and did a truck load of work on my C&C and Red Alert 2 scenarios getting them towards a near release position, and of course also did some work on this project such as finalising the sounds for all the units (and a few other things
), making some more unit special ability balance adjustments, and I also finished work on testing technologies (making sure you can research from start to finish with no glitches) and giving them all custom graphics.Speaking of technologies that's something we haven't really talked about much so far, so lets do it now. @Metro Polis has painstakingly designed an awesome custom tech tree for this mod where all units, buildings and magical range weapons are obtained via 8 schools of research (mostly inspired by HoMM2 hero secondary skills) with 7 levels in each school. Default Civ2 only has 5 schools however thankfully they have 4 levels with different icons which meant I had access to more than 5 slots allowing me to make the required 8 icons thankfully.
So here’s the final product! Some icons are from the spell tree while other ones are custom ones I made where I cut a hero skill icon out from it's blue marble background and pasted it over a spell scroll background to match the other spell icons. Also the military one is actually a combination of 3 different HoMM2 spell icons!
So where are things at? Well all that's left to do now is creating a map & decorating it, final testing, writing up documentation, and then a tour video. Then it shall be released. But how long you ask..
Hmm well.. I hope I don't regret this as I suck at meeting deadlines and I don’t wanna be one of the endless people making false promises on this forum about their projects lol, but I believe now I'm at a stage with all my projects that I can say that this project will be finished and released within the next 3 months. If I fail to meet this deadline you can all kick my ass lol.
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Nice job! Looking over the screenshots in moddb and I'm impressed by the amount of work you've done. It's a shame civ2 doesn't have an option to change the font & color of title on the panels. It's a game developed for various shades of gray backgrounds.
There's a YT channel (Celestial Heavens) with a couple of interviews with HOMM developers. A map-maker said it could take him a year to develop a good map with all the other stuff (events, units, etc.).
There's a YT channel (Celestial Heavens) with a couple of interviews with HOMM developers. A map-maker said it could take him a year to develop a good map with all the other stuff (events, units, etc.).
Thanks mate. Although unlike my other newer mod projects this project was a collaboration, and @Metro Polis deserves most of the credit for it. I just helped with little bits and pieces here and there.
But omg yes I would have LOVED to gain access to Civ2's font styles and colours. While it was a small annoyance with this project it was far more annoying with my Test of Time Graphics for MGE, C&C Scenario Remaster, and Red Alert 2 Siege of New York projects as with all 3 projects I had to push the limits of how dark you can make MGE's interface before you can't read any of the text, and I wanted to go much darker. Even made a thread on this forum asking about it a while back but no one seemed to really know of an easy way.
Hahaha yeah it'll take me a little while to make the map however fortunately in this case the map is nearly all just decoration whereas in original HoMM they were interactive objects requiring defenders, and balancing of unit spawners and hero bonuses near starting positions etc. I remember 20 years ago I started making a map for HoMM2.. don't think I got very far haha.
I am going to try to make this Civ HoMM2 map as interactive as possible though. Eg monsters (assigned to barb faction) fortified in various places and on top of nice things (I believe barb units fortified in forts don't move around the map as I've seen the trick used in other scenarios so I intend to user that). Metro has also setup some cool event driven unit spawning buildings on the map too (Dragon city baby!). Even if players don't like my map and want to use this just as a mod for their own random maps then metros spawners will still appear which is cool (I'll write a guide to help people get all the events working on their maps).
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Well I'm just impressed what the community managed to make with limited civ2 tools on hand.
How do you insert custom graphics into the DLL? Do the graphics need to be same size (e.g 640x480) as the original images?
Anyway for the "openciv2" project I've also been thinking:
- making custom RULES.txt which also defines (for each civ):
- custom fonts/colors for titles of panels and various other texts in the game,
- placing png/gif/jpgs of custom graphics into the scenario root folder so it replaces existing images from DLLs. If no images exist, it loads the GIF from DLL.
- etc.
How do you insert custom graphics into the DLL? Do the graphics need to be same size (e.g 640x480) as the original images?
Anyway for the "openciv2" project I've also been thinking:
- making custom RULES.txt which also defines (for each civ):
- font,
- font colors,
- custom colors for flags with alpha setting (transparency)
- custom fonts/colors for titles of panels and various other texts in the game,
- placing png/gif/jpgs of custom graphics into the scenario root folder so it replaces existing images from DLLs. If no images exist, it loads the GIF from DLL.
- etc.
Think I talk about these programs with you once before over at RPGCodex as I recon you'd find them useful for your work. We used GifXtractor to insert our custom images into the DLLs. It's been a while since we did that part so I can't remember all the specifics but yes I think I could replace the images with ones that were a different resolution and used a different palette (needed as some images we replaced were black and white). However no matter what we did with sizes and colours the replacement MUST NOT exceed the original image file size inside the dll (GifX kindly shows you all the byte sizes of the images inside the dll) otherwise it would crash vanilla Civ2. I think I've seen people say that MGE is more tolerant than vanilla Civ2 but we played it safe. In cases where I replaced a background image that was black and white with a colour image I had to get really friggin creative to keep the file size smaller haha.
Even if that's wrong and MGE is not fine with different and larger file sizes I believe ToT is definitely perfectly fine with bigger stuff inserted into it's DLLs however GifX will not let you exceed sizes as it was built for classic Civ2 so you need a different program called Resource Hacker if you plan to insert bigger stuff into ToT DLLs. I also ended up needing Resource Hacker a couple of time for our MGE scenario as sometimes I'd get a weird error in GifX on the last image in some dlls files and it just wouldn't let me replace it so I had to use Resource Hacker to get the job done!
For more info on how we pushed images into the DLLs and also created custom wonder/intro/death videos and animating diplomacy heralds I made or bumped a number of threads a while back to help others in the future who wanted to the do the crazy things Metro & I did. You can find them here....
Diplomacy images in dll:
https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/editing-leader-pictures.274739/#post-15516615
Custom wonder/intro/death videos:
https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/changing-wonder-videos-in-civ2-mge.648604/
Custom heralds and transparency issues:
https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/custom-heralds-and-transparency.648761/
In the Herald thread you can see how Metro figured out a way to make diplomacy leader faces animate using the herald video layer haha! CRAZY stuff!!
The custom rules for different Civs would be cool although you'd still need compatibility with the traditional system to load scenarios and their rules.txt files. I remember ToT sticks a lot of extra stuff into the rules.txt file compared to MGE so if they can do it so can you haha. Being able to load images from a folder or zip file instead of a dll would be friggin awesome! And yeah once again as you say setting it to use the old way if it can't find the new way is the best way to go!
Better support for custom GUI images, fonts, sizes etc in a Civ2 clone would certainly entice modders like me to design custom GUIs for our scenarios to use with Civ2 Clone. The limits in classic MGE & ToT are very annoying!
Oh and for anyone stumbling into this conversation wondering what on earth we're talking about. Axx is working on a Civ2 clone project over in this thread:
https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/making-a-clone-of-civ-ii.649543/page-2#post-15931778
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I used GifXtractor to get memory offsets of GIFs in DLLs for my clone project but I had no clue you could also replace gifs. I've been slacking from this forum for too long and I'm catching up on stuff that's been going on. Really impressive what you guys have done.
St. Leo
Chieftain
This looks really cool. I was searching for pictures of the Civ2 throne room and was amazed to discover this mod and scenario
Is there a download link as of yet? I'm not seeing files over at ModDB
Is there a download link as of yet? I'm not seeing files over at ModDB
Woah @St. Leo you're alive haha! I've been trying reach you man!
Yeah there isn't much left in Civ2 that this modpack doesn't tamper with haha. However unfortunately the final release of the HoMM2 Civ2 scenario & modpack has been heavily delayed due to me spending the last year or so on all the scenario preservation projects ie 1 the scifi/fantasy scenario search & rescue project, 2 the Civ2 lost websites cataloging project (which includes a backup of your old Civ2 Fora website), 3 the massive Civ2 scenario multi site backup preservation project, and 4 kicking off the huge Civ in HD video series that many of these rescued scenarios will feature in. These projects have blown out so bad that my original predictions of when I'd finish this HoMM mod project along with my Civ2 Red Alert 2 Siege of New York Scenario and other mod projects have not come true so I'm very sorry to everyone who's been waiting and wondering.
It's 100% my fault and not Metropolis's as I basically put rescuing 20 years worth of everyone else's scenarios in front of finishing my own ones as priority lol! However the good news is these projects are reaching their end ie the first 2 are as done as can be and people that are following the 3rd one (my multi site scenario preservation project) will have seen that I'm doing the final scenario uploads at the moment. Once they're done, that's it! I'll put together my Civ2 HD video and then start releasing all my scenarios and mods and this HoMM one will be one of the first. So I'm projecting early 2022, but no one should bet the house on that as we know what my ETA date predictions are like haha.
Speaking of my preservation work I've been wanting to speak to you about that @St. Leo . The above search and rescue and preservation work has lead to many amazing rescues thanks to Solver giving me his Apolyton scenario backups, Thunderfall giving me access to the old CFC scenario backups, me finding webarchive backups of many lost Civ2 sites, and private collectors coming forward and helping me. However despite all that there are unfortunately still some mega lost scenarios I've been unable to find copies of anywhere! I've put a list of them into the thread below and one of the missing ones is your Star Trek 7of9 scenario. Any chance you still have a copy of your work mate?
https://forums.civfanatics.com/thre...d-scenarios-on-dustin-dunns-civ2-site.669203/
Obviously you used to run the SLeague and must have been quite the collector back in the day so if you think you have any of those other long lost scenarios in your possession please please please let me know mate!!!
That lost scenario thread might also interest you as I was able to lure your Poly SL predecessor Blackclove (who started it all) back to CFC for a bit and he posted in the thread. I think I even posted somewhere that I was hoping to lure you back to say hello there too and really blow away people's minds haha..
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Metro Polis
Warlord
Oh man, so much time has passed! I don't have any of the HoMM2 files anymore. As soon as it was finished I sent Blake everything and deleted it.
Blake must be the only person in the world to have access to that mod.
Blake must be the only person in the world to have access to that mod.
Oh man, so much time has passed! I don't have any of the HoMM2 files anymore. As soon as it was finished I sent Blake everything and deleted it.
Blake must be the only person in the world to have access to that mod.
Why did you delete everything anyway? Whenever I run out of hard drive space these days I just buy a bigger hard drive haha.
Also I remember you telling me you deleted everything in the past and then went back through our epic PM convo downloading everything again. So does that mean you deleted everything a second time?? 
But yes it's a bit scary know that I have the only copy, however fortunately I've backed it up across multiple drives in different physical locations locations. I'm finishing up the last of my preservation work atm and I'm about to go on 4 weeks leave from work in the next few weeks so I intend to smash the last of that, and get busy with this stuff and my videos in the holidays!
So I'm currently drawing up the final plans to finish this mod for release. As well as creating a scenario I've also had some ideas to conquer the 2 last things in Civ2 that Metro and I didn't touch which is the spaceship and the video advisors. I've sent some of these ideas to Metro today and will take care of the work myself (as Metro is retired so I don't wanna bother him other than stimulating conversation and exchanging ideas haha!
).The only problem is the scenario. Recently conversations in the ToTPP Thread regarding custom videos have made me realise that in MGE videos are disabled when in scenario mode. And even if I access the secret video playing menu TheNamelessOne told me about it still fails to play them. This isn't going to bother Metro as he didn't want to make a scenario in the first place and just wanted to release it as a modpack. However I would really like to still make one especially as our mod suffers from that annoying problem with starting settlers disappearing in the first few turns killing AIs so I'd like to give people a pre-started game with first cities already built surrounded by a nice map (thats very HoMM looking) with lots of decoration tricks. However the moment I do that I kill the ability to play our custom wonder videos.
So I was thinking perhaps after creating my custom map I could setup starting savegames for each of the 7 factions and the savegames would essentially be the scenario replacement. However to ensure I avoid the settlers disappearing issue I need to activate cheat mode in turn 1 and take control of each 7 Civs to build their starting cities to stop them suiciding lol. So then the savegames are stuck with the cheat flag on grr. I know I've seen a page or a thread somewhere about being able to remove the cheat flag on a savegame. Does anyone remember where that info is? Or remember how to do it off by heart? @Knighttime @Prof. Garfield
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Thanks mate! I'll give that try when the time comes.
Well after so long since the last proper one I guess it's time to post a new project update as I've taken a break from the last of my preservation work and done some more work on the Heroes of Might & Magic 2 mod. I've recently been chatting with Civ2 modding legend John Valdez @CivPartisan and while telling him about all the crazy stuff @Metro Polis and I did with this project it got the old creative juices flowing again and I started thinking about the final 3 things that Metro and I never replaced.
The first one was that back in 2019 I talked with MetroPolis in our dev convo about how I planned to make the Civilization 2 Diplomacy Screen look like the HoMM2 campaign selection screen with the stone wall and the picture frames. I then went to try and do it and realised pretty quickly that the bricks were too big and there was both torch and window light bouncing off everything at different angles (see pic below) so trying to copy and paste the bricks into a bigger wall and resizing the picture frames seemed too difficult so I gave up and never did it.
Then I last year I saw that @Knighttime had made something very similar for his awesome Medieval Millennium ToT mod and it was literally what I wanted.. stone brick wall with a wooden picture frame haha.
So I recently asked his permission to use it and credit him in our mod and he said yes! However a problem with using Knighttime's awesome medieval background is that I've destroyed the floor all our custom video herald monsters stand on. So I decided to take a peak in the the vanilla Civ2 throne room pv dll to see if it had some nice floors and sure enough it did. So I recoloured one of them and stuck it in for the herald monsters to stand on and I think the end result looks pretty good. I also finally fixed the problem of modern day strength icons being displayed on the sides and have made them all ancient style now which suits better. Then finally Knighttime went above and beyond and offered to get his original source files and resize his wooden picture frame to fit our custom HoMM2 leaderhead's! So by actually doing work that contributed to this mod he's officially inserted himself into the HoMM2 mod team list haha. Here's the finished results which I'm really liking!
So that leaves only 2 things left that Metro and I haven't replaced or messed with in our HoMM2 mod, which is the Spaceship and High Counsel Video advisors which we originally deemed too hard to change.
For the Spaceship I decided to use the awesome 'breeding your own dragon' spaceship replacement from @MattDempsey 's excellent Game of Thrones mod and give it a HoMM2 background and stick him in our mod credits too so that will fix that problem. I've got some ideas for the spaceship launch and landing video replacements too.
GoT Mod
HoMMafied!
As for the High Council video advisors as far as I know no one has ever changed them before but I came up with an idea the other night to replace them too. Metro & I only used a portion of the HoMM2 hero portraits for our Civ2 diplomacy leaders so there's plenty of spare ones. So I'm thinking I'll mount a hero portrait over the top of the original video (the free video editor ShotCut supports layers/tracks and putting tracks over the top of others) and do some simple mouth moving and blinking animations (similar to what Metro and Kasius did with the animating leader faces diplomacy experiment). Because I'm still using the original video file underneath it will retain all the important audio timing cues. I'm thinking I'll have a knight or barbarian over the top of the military advisor, a couple of fancy rich wizard, knight or bard looking guys over the science, economy & entertainment guys, and a sorceress over the spy chick.
So I did a test and just stuck one of the knight pictures over a couple of the advisors video sections. I managed to find a legacy mpg export setting in ShotCut that is loadable with the old 90s Ulead Indeo video editing program (running in a XP VM lol) that Metro used to do all our custom Wonder and Herald videos and exported it in Indeo video format and tested in Civ2 and boom! It worked!
NOTE: this is a very quick and dirty test.. obviously in the final product I'll make sure the Heroes face covers the entire advisor haha. Despite all the codec format changes and recompressing the audio timing cues match up perfectly still.
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