In light of recent events here at Celestial Heavens, we would like to remind you all to change your passwords, both for this site and others you may frequent. I'm sure you're aware of the general advice when it comes to passwords: use many letters, numbers and special signs, making sure that the password is not easily guessed by people or bots. A good tip, in fact, is to have extremely difficult passwords, and different ones for every site you visit. To remember them, write them down in a small book or leaflet and put that on your shelf. The thing is, these days it is much more likely that your passwords will be stolen through digital means such as hacking; burglars are unlikely to rummage through your house looking for that little book with passwords. If they do break in, they're going for phones, tablets, jewelry and such things.

More advice here and here.

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If you are a long time fan of Heroes II. there's high chance that you already heard about it, if not check it now.

 

Project Ironfist adds new monsters, maps and spells to Heroes II. with help of scripting. Together with a new campaign(s). It all started by reverse-engineering the game in August 2010 by Darmani, who now asked me to help him to allure more people in his team. The mod is now in version 1.2.1 and you need windows version of the game to playing it.

Just before that I recommend you to see following videos, as it's said that one picture is for thousand words, so one video must be, ..even better. Below is link to campaign trailer "Last Stand" and modding tutorials: Introduction, Scripting, Adding New Creatures and Modding the Code.


 

Who is needed? Let's hear:

"We’re on the prowl for new programmers and web-designers, so if you are one or know anyone with the awesome skill to join our super ninja programming team – please send us a shout. :-)

Send a sample of your work to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. . Do you have what it takes?
We’re now looking for the following roles:

  1. Graphics Designer (both 2D and 3D) - if you can turn 4 colors into a lush forest - then you are the one we’re looking for - Join our elite team to be a crucial part of the development of this awesome adventure!
  2. Code Ninja - if you have the talent and speed to dive into a codebase and build new features, or even reverse-engineer old ones, come join our elite group of developers and help shape this awesome Cyborg campaign! Also, did I mention the technology that makes our modding possible is seriously impressive (developed by an MIT computer scientist).
  3. Sound Designer - if you are able to manipulate sounds so well that you’ll be able to re-make retro music in a cool new campaign bringing sci-fi and fantasy into a unique clash - come join us!!
  4. Concept Artist - if you a have a passion for both Sci-fi and Fantasy, and you think you can bring to life the awesome characters and environments we’ve created - come test your skills with us!!

Join us in this amazing campaign to breath life into this awesome sci-fi fantasy game!!!

 

The Project Ironfist topic in our forums is here, where you may follow its regular updates.

Did I mentioned cyborgs? No? Huge mistake, they are there too!

 

 

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Hello everyone! News from iLiVeInAbOx05:

A new H4MG build is ready for download. Go here to get it! If you haven't tried it out yet, read the instructions, otherwise just scroll to the bottom of the page and download it :)

The AI Enhancing portion of the H4MG has come far enough along that it’s ready to be released. Additional AI enhancing events and features will continue to be developed and released (discussed in this thread.)

Here is a video with a demonstration and info:



Here is a what can be done with the AI panel:
- Add a number of AI enhancing events at the push of a button.
- Clear all AI enhancing events at the push of a button.
- Edit the AI enhancing events while being able to restore the events to their defaults.

Planned features for the AI panel:
- Save / load your AI profile (the settings you prefer for AI enhancements).


Here is a list of events / scripts implemented followed by those still on the way:
AI Enhancement
- Show entire map for AI
- Make every player "vital" under AI properties
- Events to give gold / resources to AI (including recurring increases)
- Increase starting level of AI heroes
- Reduce neutrals on encounter for AI (fewer AI losses while still gaining normal experience)
- Increased AI movement
- Increased AI experience
- Increase dwelling populations for AI towns
- Starting skills for new AI heroes. (Need suggestions for skill combinations)
- AI artifact sorting (PatFX working on this)
- AI hero stat buffs

Other
- Balancing mechanism for neutral armies for each difficulty level
- Make the AI options tunable for difficulty. The easiest way to do this would be to have a selectable percentage reduction applied for each difficulty level under champion.
- Control neutrals vs. an opponent.

This release also includes a feature to copy/paste or move a selected area of a map. Note: move will only work on the same map and level. See the video below for a demonstration/explanation!

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As Heroes VII development is officially ended and Limbic's contract with Ubisoft expired, we ask: what's next? There are also rumours going around that Erwan le Breton's "M&M team" has been disbanded. The way we see it, there are three general options:

  1. Ubisoft continue to develop the franchise, publishing games like M&M 11 and another Heroes title, possibly with Erwan le Breton's team, possibly with Limbic as developers, possibly somebody else. I'm honestly not sure if this is the preferred option; with Ubisoft's financial muscle behind the franchise, at least we are assured a continuation. However, I think we can all agree that many of the choices made in recent years have not been good ones and that changes would have to be made.
  2. Ubisoft sells the franchise to another game producer. Given that fans have been unhappy with several of Ubisoft's strategies, some have argued that it would be better if the whole thing was handed over to somebody else. The hope, then, is that the new producers are more dedicated to the wellness of the franchise and develop games of which the fans approve. This, however, is far from guaranteed. Changing producers could make things even worse.
  3. The franchise is mothballed. No new Might & Magic or Heroes games are made and the world moves on to other things. Just like great games of the past can now be found on abandonia.com or GOG, some of the more well-made games in the series may still be played years or even decades from now. Fans may start to produce high-quality mods and maps, keeping the show somewhat alive, but as time passes by, most of them will move on. This will effectively mean the end, albeit a drawn-out one. As a good friend of mine put it, however: perhaps it is time.

 

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Bye Bye IvanOld proverb says that "all good things come to an end". I would add that unfinished as well. Today Ubisoft offically announced, that hotfix 2.2.1 released yesterday was the last one and farewell.

Long suffering is gone, this was, let to say, expected outcome.

We may certainly speculate, what, where and why that happened. But let admit that for more than a half year Ubisoft communication with a fans was sporadic at best. Only the die hard fans from Limbic, like Hero or Oakwarrior, and of course omni-presented deity Ubi-Moshi were here.


The future is in the mods and modders, which could do, especially with help of ex-developers, a miracles.
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You may have noticed we had some troubles the last few days, with our forums going down and accounts being unaccessible. The simple reason for this is: we were hacked. Exploiting a weakness in Joomla after our update, some childish idiots who probably thought deleting forum accounts on a small fan website was really funny, managed to wreak havoc on our little home. It could even be an automated hack, created to exploit the weakness in any website it could find. Thanks to the sterling efforts of our admin Pol, however, we have now been restored to normal function.

As a small editor's note: we admire the efforts of hacking groups like "Anonymous", or hackers who try to discover flaws in software security so that these flaws can be corrected. Such individuals work to protect the safeties and freedoms of ordinary people in the digital world. On the other hand, people who target sites like ours, I mean - what's the point? We're just a small gaming website, not even remotely harmful. Hacking a site like ours is just juvenile. So this is my advice to whoever out there may feel this applies to them: grow up, get a life and leave us alone.

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rocknrollbaby sDo you remember that small message at "08 August 2016". Now it's done!

After some "tick tack" with our hoster they updated us today, so you could experienced a small downtime.

Please report any issues, as usually, in our bug thread.

All the base are, basic functionality have been checked and everything seems to work, just faster.

 

To the top of that the avatar on the main site and some minor login problems were fixed today as well. There were also activated "Active Topics" and when you click on forum category, like here, you will see them too.

Rock'n'Roll Baby!

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There's an interesting announcement on Ubisoft's Chinese channel, talking about a cooperation designed to increase Ubisoft's sphere of influence, increasing their activity in the Chinese market. Granted, my Chinese is about as good as my Klingon, so I had to rely on an online translating tool and things may have gotten lost in translation - still, it seems Ubisoft are looking to spread their market shares in the mobile market by entering into such cooperations.

The international channels are quiet so far, so there is no telling what effect (if any) this will have on the English-speaking part of the franchise.

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As we wrote in previous news article, we has some progress with AI Enhancement Tool programming. We decided to put the tool to test.

To do that we chose one of the maps selected for World Championship 2016 Heroes 4 online - W16 El Dorado. We let the AI play this map twice for two months. First playthrough was AS IS (AI-1), and second playthrough AI was aided by scripts from AI Enhancement Tool (AI-2).

H4MG AI panel settings:

ai enhancement settings

Then we compared the results, and want to share them with you.

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