[HN Gopher] Open-Source Engine for Heroes of Might and Magic 3
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Open-Source Engine for Heroes of Might and Magic 3
Author : WoodenKatana
Score : 117 points
Date : 2020-01-04 11:59 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| peshooo wrote:
| Nice. There is a open source engine for the original X-Com games
| - OpenXcom. I recently started playing a total conversion mod for
| it called X-Piratez. Its a total blast.
| haunter wrote:
| Open Source Game Clones
|
| https://osgameclones.com/
| qwerty456127 wrote:
| I wish there also was an open-source engine for WarCraft 2, with
| modern AI, big screen resolutions support but without the
| drawbacks of modern RTS games like GPU power requirements (making
| it hard to play them on commodity hardware) and excessive
| graphics complexity (making map and tile design hard).
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| http://wargus.github.io/
|
| I never played WC2 but found this here:
| https://osgameclones.com/
|
| Link to osgameclones shared by someone else on here. It's also
| shown up on HN a couple of times.
| CoolGuySteve wrote:
| I want the same thing for the opposite reason.
|
| I want someone to make an RTS with sprites instead of 3D models
| and shader-based flow simulation for path finding so I can have
| battles with billions of units.
|
| Sort of like how Total Annihilation could scale but updated for
| modern computer architectures.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| And I want sprites instead of 3D models for yet different
| reason - it's somehow in practice very hard to make serious
| game with 3D graphics. As far as I can tell, no RTS like that
| was ever made. 3D graphics - especially with tight polygon
| budget - ends up being cheesy.
|
| Take StarCraft vs. StarCraft 2. The transition from drawn
| sprites to 3D models made the game lose its entire mood.
| keldaris wrote:
| > shader-based flow simulation for path finding
|
| Are you aware of any real world examples that implement this?
| I've seen a few research papers over the years, but nothing
| beyond a rough proof of concept. As a fellow TA fan
| disappointed by SupCom and every other RTS since, this sounds
| tempting.
| bsder wrote:
| As a Total Annihilation fan, what displeased you about
| Supreme Commander?
|
| I adored TA, but I"m _REALLY_ struggling to come up with
| anything better than Supreme Commander.
|
| TA's ships moved like molassess. TA's planes had enormous
| turning radii. TA's big units were effectively useless
| because they took far too much resource to build.
| keldaris wrote:
| Three things displeased me. First, one of the (many) ways
| in which TA was revolutionary for its time was that it
| largely emphasized thinking over rapid micromanagement
| and SC was a regression in this regard, an unnecessary
| concession to the RTS scene of the day. Second, how
| technically underwhelming it was in terms of pushing the
| envelope in scale, unit counts etc. compared to the
| gigantic leap in available performance between 1997 and
| 2007. Third, the unsolvable technical limitation that any
| game against the AI (including custom AIs) would
| eventually crawl to an unplayable lagfest - this is still
| true even on today's hardware.
| CoolGuySteve wrote:
| I am not but it seems like an intuitive solution to the
| problem where the path is blocked by other units so one of
| stragglers routes alllllllllll the way around the map and
| straight through the enemy base.
| bsaul wrote:
| the recent revival of hmm on ios by a major editor ( can't
| remember the name) was such a disappointment... They completely
| changed the gameplay to adapt it to the current trend of buying
| things on the store to progress faster...
|
| There's such a big opportunity for a simple port of hmm on mobile
| with regular gameplay and maybe a small refresh of the graphics !
| Itaxpica wrote:
| A simple port of Heroes 3 is currently available on iOS (though
| only iPad, not iPhone)
| StavrosK wrote:
| Was that really HoMM? IIRC that's a HoMM-lookalike that's
| basically Farmville.
|
| Sidenote, I absolutely detest the modern trend of games that
| push you to buy things every five minutes or watch an ad every
| half.
| MikusR wrote:
| There was https://archive.is/20150311153857/https://mmh7.ubi.
| com/en/bl...
| StavrosK wrote:
| That URL won't load for me, is it just me?
| foobarian wrote:
| I gave my 6yro an old WiFi-only iPhone to futz around with
| and download a few games. She ended up with a bunch of
| shovelware that shows ads after every level, and the "levels"
| are trivial things built on top of some kind of physics
| engine. It is sad beyond belief.
|
| Now I am despairing because I want to find a good mobile
| game, something that you can buy and play that feels like a
| FF6 or a Ultima or Super Mario type thing without annoying
| in-game purchases or wait-to-play mechanics. But it's slim
| pickings... it seems the industry has evolved to be
| codependent on those things and now that's what most of the
| content is like. :(
| Itaxpica wrote:
| Apple Arcade is a pretty good fix for this; for a basic
| monthly fee you get access to over a hundred games with no
| ads or in-app purchases
| konfusinomicon wrote:
| Grab launchbox or some other emulator for Android and look
| into some of the ff6 ROM hacks out there..some of them are
| vastly different games yet maintain the feel of the
| original game and are a lot of fun. The nostalgia brings
| back a flood of childhood memories
| robrtsql wrote:
| This seems like a good opportunity to point out that FF6 is
| available for iOS for $7:
|
| https://apps.apple.com/us/app/final-fantasy-vi/id719401490
|
| The App Store/Play Store has quite a few games without in-
| app purchases or ads (which you have to buy up-front, of
| course, but that's only fair), but all the ones that I can
| think of are ports or remakes of classic games that predate
| smartphones.
| Scene_Cast2 wrote:
| If you're up for a hack-n-slash dungeon crawler, try
| Triglav. Their monetization strategy is selling item
| inventory space and cosmetics.
| StavrosK wrote:
| I am in exactly the same boat as you. I downloaded Head
| Ball 2, as 1 used to be a very entertaining game, and in 2
| I spend 90 seconds in a match and two minutes watching ads,
| scratching scratchers and opening "free gift packs".
|
| I ended up buying Planescape Torment for those 50 hours of
| engrossing story with no ads or payments. If you find any
| other games, please let me know.
|
| I should create a website called "no-bullshit games",
| actually.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _I should create a website called "no-bullshit games",
| actually._
|
| Please do. I actually half-seriously considered doing it
| myself more than once, but you have a much better track
| record of finishing side projects :).
| StavrosK wrote:
| I have started it, it will be at
| https://nobsgames.stavros.io in a day or two, I estimate.
| yakshaving_jgt wrote:
| I'm looking forward to seeing nobullshitgames.com!
| StavrosK wrote:
| It's taken :( Also, I'm trying to challenge the notion
| that everything needs to have a TLD, so I'm going to
| deploy it to https://nobsgames.stavros.io.
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| How hard have you looked? There are full games like Final
| Fantasy Tactics, Knights of the Old Republic, Chrono
| Trigger, and more ported to iOS.
|
| Don't be too surprised that free games are shovel-/ad-ware.
| SloopJon wrote:
| I think I have the Linux version of this game in my attic.
|
| Steam and GOG had big sales through the end of December that had
| me looking at some old games like this. I thought about getting
| some Microprose games to spare me the trouble of copying them
| from 5.25" and 3.5" floppies (if they're even readable anymore),
| but I figured it was just as well to leave the graphics and
| gameplay to my rose-colored memory.
|
| It did get me thinking about what it takes to bring classic games
| to a modern audience. Grim Fandango and Age of Empires have
| gotten updates, primarily to the assets. The negative reviews
| tend to focus on old-fashioned gameplay, or bugs that _still_
| haven 't been fixed after umpteen years.
|
| A project like this reminds me of the ScummVM engines, which
| basically provide a new platform for old assets. It's harder to
| get excited about this, because it's just one game.
| danbolt wrote:
| I think content-esque updates tend to be the the sweet spot on
| resources/ROI for games such as Age of Empires II expansions.
|
| I can imagine codebases for older games are likely written in
| an older dialect of C++ (and probably in a very C style at the
| time, to boot) and likely haven't had any ongoing maintenance
| or technical debt addressed. Most of the income from the
| product came from one win32 binary (plus perhaps an update)
| that shipped on CD years ago. The engineering/QA cost of
| writing or maintaining new features is going to be high, so I
| can imagine a publisher is going to look at the returns of an
| expansion to an old game and see that a conservative release is
| the most economic bet to make.
| uxp100 wrote:
| Just to be clear, this post kinda implied to me that HoMM 3
| doesn't run on modern machines. It does, and there is a patch
| that provides higher resolutions and some other features.
|
| This is still cool though, but it's not required to play the
| game on a modern PC.
| glouwbug wrote:
| I highly admire projects like this. Something even as simple as a
| core engine rewrite is a spiritual undertaking. I do not recall
| if Heroes 3 was multiplayer or not, but making the game
| multiplayer over TCP required the engine to limit itself to the
| use of integers since a single floating point would butterfly
| effect its way into destabilizing the lockstep system used in
| peer to peer networking. AMD / INTEL / POWERPC systems of the day
| (and even today) have millions of flags to configure the FPU at
| compile time.
|
| As a shameless plug, and if anyone's interested, I'm doing
| something similar with Age of Empires 2:
| https://github.com/glouw/openempires
| Itaxpica wrote:
| Heroes 3 did have multiplayer via LAN, and IIRC it had online
| multiplayer as well. It worked pretty well for the time; the
| fact that the game is turn-based probably helped in that
| regard.
| kzrdude wrote:
| And it has hotseat - players taking turn at one computer,
| that was the mode me and friends always played.
| gspr wrote:
| I think the number one after-school activity for me and my
| friends was at some point HOMM 3 (and 2).
| kilburn wrote:
| The game does have multiplayer capabilities even over the
| Internet.
|
| What's more, it still has some active players, among which I
| would highlight MeKick (TheKnownWorld) that regularly streams
| on twitch [1]. Anyway, the challenges he does vs computers
| (where he heavily handicaps himself in different ways) are more
| entertaining to me [2].
|
| [1] https://www.twitch.tv/theknownworld/videos
|
| [2] https://www.youtube.com/user/TheKnownWorld/featured
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