The Heroes Round Table

You start the map fairly developed as well. The best defense is a good offense. If you have a strong and fast hero attacking to the northeast, you don't need to defend your northeast. The AI has the advantage of lots of resources and troop growth. Your advantages are a powerful hero and human skill....

Actually, you already can explore it. That hole is Nelsham's Scar, which is a playable map in Dark Messiah.

In other news, I have finally gotten around to releasing a couple tools I wrote a month ago for dealing with the AGG files which contain H2 data. One of these is an AGG extractor. These have already existed, and are nothing new. Another is a AGG creator, which is something new. Also included is a co...

After a lot of work, I have successfully managed to massage a disassembly of H2 into something that reassembles into a somewhat-playable version, despite having a lot of addresses changed. It's still not that playable, and is wrought with bugs, some of them hilarious. For example, attempting to pick...

What, is it worse than being associated with Mongols? (For me it's better, since I know enough about the Mongols to get annoyed with Nival's liberties.)

Ironically, what usually happens is that the pieces are made all over the place, and then assembled in China.

Edit: nevermind

Yeah, that's a terrible problem. I've heard the suggestion of setting up the game with Hotseat on a virtual PC, and having multiple players remote connect in [with a gentleman's agreement not to look at what other players are doing]. Maybe I should figure out how to actually do that efficiently (or ...

That sounds quite dubious -- given that the Warlock will quite likely be making a beeline for enemy castles soon after acquiring Dragons. I suppose it greatly depends on the map, but the plan you just described will take a large amount of time. For starters, there's the matter of it calling for mult...

This is a continuation of the discussion in http://www.celestialheavens.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=8724 . I definitely agree with Pollo that Barbarians have a strong advantage over Warlock in small maps. But I completely do not see any evidence for the Necro being "just so imbalanced that anyth...

I had the same argument to some extent back on Page 11 or so of the H2 Modding thread (I definitely agree on the Barbarian's strength on small maps). I'm interested in having this conversation still, but it belongs in a new thread.

/me goes to make said thread

Forget my previous post.

To activate debug mode,open the Command Prompt, navigate to the directory containing HoMM II, and run the following:

I thought I'd share something fun I found. At address 3409D, change the byte "84" to "85." (This effectively swaps the "then" part of an if-statement with the "else" part.) This enables a "debug mode." A "Debug" menu will appear in both the...

I can confirm these are palettes. The code to load them originally lay in a palette.cpp. (A lot of information leaks out in debugging tests, teehee.)

You might want to take another look at BMPs -- they aren't in the normal format. Thanks for the hint on opening 82m, and for the guess on TIL. I already knew most of the rest though. The most important part to a modder, though, is exactly how the files are laid out (so that we can make new files of ...

I thought I should probably mention this blog post on reverse-engineering some of the file formats in HoMM II that I found a few months ago: http://www.terrybutler.co.uk/misc/heroes-of-might-and-magic-ii/ I've contacted the author asking for more details; he says he hasn't had the time to post. I'm ...

I had wondered a few days ago whether it would be a good idea to cease work on reverse-engineering HoMM II and let all major mods be made off fheroes2. I'll refrain from bashing on someone else's work (especially since our efforts in the stickied thread are just getting off the ground), but there ar...

Sure! I started with my earlier work on Lightning Bolt. I found the format string for "The Lighting bolt does %d damage", and found the references to it. It quickly became apparent that this was in the "CastCombatSpell" function, which I marked as such. Through similar methods, I...

Looks like Fireball, Cold Ray, and Fireblast share the same damage-computing code. Here's a patch to change the damage to 13*spellpower: This difference file is created by The Interactive Disassembler HEROES2W.EXE 0009FDA9: 8D BA 0009FDAA: 04 0D 0009FDAB: 80 00 0009FDAC: 03 00 0009FDAD: C0 00 0009FD...

On the "What games have you played at least 12 hours of in the past 12 months" question, I had to mark 0 boxes -- but it wouldn't let me, saying "You must answer the question." I decided the least dishonest would be to mark Civ 5, since I did buy Civ 4 a couple months ago.