http://heroescommunity.com/viewthread.php3?TID=29511
but I may repost it here too as I want to reach to people with this idea :
What I'm proposing here is mainly for HoTA devs to consider, but who knows maybe someone else will be interested too ? .
HoTA seems like an amazing project, with great Art and ideas. VCMI ( http://vcmi.antypika.aplus.pl/forum/portal.php )is another ambitious project that tries to write a H3-like game engine from scratch. It's a fresh project but it's progressing in a very fast pace (just like HoTA). With it it would be possible to make HoTA a standalone H3-like open source game. HoTA plans 3 castles, if you add to it the almost ready Bastion and the future HoTA roman town we have 5 towns. It's more then enough for a fun game. The extra work is not that much if you compare it with the task of doing whole 3 cities. What's left is menu graphics / terrain / and spells animation.
Seeing the effort put into HoTA and VCMI it's just a waste that both projects are right now dependent on H3, labbeled as mods or engine. The great graphics of HoTA, new castles and ideas (like new war machines) the effort of VCMI team to make a great engine IMHO it all deserves to be standalone project. It could be called VCMI: Horn of the Abyss ... or OpenHeroes : Horn of the Abyss ...
There are many pros of not going to be another h3 mod but a standalone game.
No need to have original H3 files. You can get new people into this game aside from die hard Heroes fans. Furthermore within upcoming years it will only be harder to get the original Heroes3 (buy it)
No h3 legacy, With a new game you will not be tied to many limitations of h3. How the balance there works, 256 800x600 graphics which is archaic right now, limits (units, game mechanics) and bugs of the original game.
For example bigger res then 800x600 . VCMI will do those like this :
http://www.thedarkhouse.toxic.pl/EkranBitwy1024x768.jpg
http://www.thedarkhouse.toxic.pl/EkranZamku1024x768.jpg
However it would be nice if the battle window was not 800x600 but 1024x768 or even bigger as people use bigger res right now. Since HoTA team does their graphics in 3d mostly it shouldn't be hard to do two sets of graphics and make one widescreen friendly if you have the 3d models
Long life. VCMI is under GPL license (it's open source). VCMI will most likely support many platforms: Windows, Linux, MacOSX. It may also have a 64 bit version and in few years time 64 bit may be a de-facto standard... You cannot adopt with the closed h3 engine to that.
Many possibilities for example VCMI will have a h5 like “simultanous turns” and a secure network mode that should prevent cheating in games (all planed in VCMI)... Once again it would be impossible to do those with the H3 closed engine.
Would be nice to see something like that. HoMM has a fantastic community and I always wondered why we do not have any OpenHeroes or FreeHeroes game (and other games like civilization series have their open versions like FreeCiv). If HoTA team isn't interested in this I would at least ask to publish their work on some kind of open license (like creative commons for graphics, and GPL for the source code) that would allow other to do it . Would be great if the same happened with Bastion town. Then maybe somebody would step up and make a stand alone game from it.