Open-Source Engine for Heroes of Might and Magic 3
github.com
github.com
As a shameless plug, and if anyone's interested, I'm doing something similar with Age of Empires 2: https://github.com/glouw/openempires
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].
and or an open sourcing of a clone so that we could crowd source an EE 4 ...
I enjoyed age of empires but always liked empire earth 1 and 2 better.. never could pinpoint why exactly.
maybe a subconscious connection to some of the populace' gameplay mechanics on the Amiga - dunno.
maybe it's time for me to look at one of the EE clone things and try to make it like EE. I'ts been a long while, does AoE have magic priests that can convert enemy followers or similar? or is it just attack / kill ?
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.
This is still cool though, but it's not required to play the game on a modern PC.
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.
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 !
Sidenote, I absolutely detest the modern trend of games that push you to buy things every five minutes or watch an ad every half.
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. :(
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.
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 :).
reminds me of about a year ago I was searching for ad free apps for the play store and found zero resources - I don't mind paying for something, but I want it ad free / total privacy and zero interruptions.. never did find a way to search the play store for things in this way.. it's even obscured within the play store on more details - you can get ranges of prices for in app purchases, but nothing tells me, pay X to get ad free..
So I found f-droid eventually, but I want a way to give from the play store to others - just no list of no BS games and apps..
luckily I found 'missed reminder' and 'rssDemon' long ago when it was easier to find a single-price-point, premium version available app.. now a days it's too much work trying to use the play store or the G search engine.. this noBS site sounds like heaven.
Obviously, the UI is going to be entirely replaced (and the iOS info fetching isn't ready yet).
Don't be too surprised that free games are shovel-/ad-ware.
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.
That’s disappointing; sorry to get your hopes up
Sure, there were quicker fixes, like Street Fighter etc., then later the convenience of online with Warcraft 2, StarCraft (dialing up directly to your friend's computer), but..
Having a couple friends come over and having some good natured competition, seeing their reactions in person, having to think up strategies in a way that wouldn't make it apparent what you were going to do, the shifting alliances of teaming up against whoever was winning, the impromptu bets and bargains...
That was a kind of fun that I haven't seen replicated since.
Startup Idea: A sort of alternative arcade for hotseat PC games like that.
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.
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.
Take StarCraft vs. StarCraft 2. The transition from drawn sprites to 3D models made the game lose its entire mood.
Or perhaps you don't consider it an RTS? If not, then what genre would you classify it as?
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.
Why this should even be a problem? It seems reasonable when a tank can't ride over another tank but as for infantry units - it always seemed bizarre a man can't travel through a cell occupied by another man.
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.
I suspect that modern graphics cards could probably chew through this--but you need to build an engine that leans into the way modern graphics cards work.
Can't these parameters be tweaked somehow? Experimenting with unit parameters was a lot of fun in Tiberian Sun where you could just edit a text file to get whatever you imagine. TA has to store unit parameters somewhere too, perhaps these can be edited with a hex editor.
> To use VCMI you need to own original data files.
"use strict"; "use restrict";
//Number of bits in an integer var INT_BITS = 32;
//Constants exports.INT_BITS = INT_BITS; exports.INT_MAX = 0x7fffffff; exports.INT_MIN = -1<<(INT_BITS-1);
//Returns -1, 0, +1 depending on sign of x exports.sign = function(v) { return (v > 0) - (v < 0); }