Anyone knows any Twitch-streamer that plays this mod?

Hello,

I have found some material on Youtube when people play this mod.

Anyone here knows any Twitch-streamer who plays it regularly?

Knight wrote:

Hello,

I have found some material on Youtube when people play this mod.

Anyone here knows any Twitch-streamer who plays it regularly?

Not many people have streamed H3SW on Twitch, but I like to watch BlackAdder play. He covered H3SW when v0.8.0 came out and more recently with the release of v0.8.2, which you can watch here:
https://www.twitch.tv/blackaddersplays/video/1698711891

He plays well, is entertaining and knows his HoMM stuff

YouTube hosts plenty of videos of people seemingly streaming H3SW (or, to be more precise, streaming in the past). It is possible to check if they have Twitch accounts.

I doubt people stream much H3SW right now, because there are still complaints about the general instability (problem of ERA 2 as a platform) and the overall unfinished feel of the mod (curiosity at best: many people revert back to H2 for similar gaming impressions because H2 plays faster and H3SW doesn't yet offer a better gameplay because most of the new gaming mechanics like magic system, better class diversity and more sophisticated dwelling system are not implemented). Campaigns, if added, will surely boost the number of people streaming H3SW after a release including them. For how long - this is a question.

I was reluctant to release H3SW more often in the past because of that: people are often disillusioned after some time of playing, because they don't get the package which could sustain their attention to the game.

H3SW has replaced H2 for me, for a lot of reasons: the extra units, better UI, more factions, greater balance (to name but a few).

And in fact it has also replaced a lot of my regular H3 play. The gameplay is similar to H3 but the favorable elements of H2 remain. I don't find it slower.

Moreover, I have small children, so the appearance of H2 appeals to them while the depth of H3 still remains in this version for me.

Quote :

The gameplay is similar to H3

That is because it's H3 and that's where it becomes kind of a problem.

H3 had more artifacts and all of them had a defined slot in the inventory, so you basically knew what artifact you need from the start and you wouldn't accumulate too much duplicates. H3 maps had more objects to waste time at, and H3 battlefield is larger, with fights becoming much slower especially with the heavy usage of Wait button.

While general H3 online game can easily go beyond 2 hours, a H2 online game can go for 15-40 minutes, which is not very dissimilar to actual competitive multiplayer games like Dota 2 or PUBG. H3 maps just have that much things to do. Simultaneous turns did somewhat even that out, but a) we don't have that feature for H3SW and b) we are still nowhere close to provide a different experience.

We had a lot of ideas in mind, including re-imagined Eagle Eye as a "magic for warrior classes" skill and re-imagined dwelling system where the player wouldn't have to accumulate Angels and Wyverns with rushing to the Hill Fort for upgrades afterwards, fighting with their native creatures instead. But as of now, it all requires a vast programming effort which is not being done at the moment.

AbsoluteZero on Youtube streamed HoMM3: The Succession Wars yesterday: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QI8OKmbiEDg

But he stopped affter 1 hour due to the bugs that crashed the game

That's what I'm talking about.
The crash is random and basically requires re-loading Autosave each time it happens.

The situation is going to the point where I will have to bring the platform transfer suggestion to the team, and I'm not entirely sure it has to be ERA at all.

Orzie wrote:

That's what I'm talking about.
The crash is random and basically requires re-loading Autosave each time it happens.

1. Get dxwrapper

2. Place dxwrapper.ini and dxwrapper.dll into the game executable's directory

3. Put the fake ddraw.dll from dxwrapper.zip\Stub\ into the same directory

4. Edit dxwrapper.ini to enable just one option: SingleProcAffinity = 99 (which means binding the process to the last available CPU core instead of letting the OS juggle it across the cores as it pleases)

5. The rest of the variables should be all set to zero so that the wrapper omits any actual graphics API wrapping.

This will hopefully eliminate the random crashes.

To make the HD mod work:

1. Download & install the latest HD mod.

2. Delete the folder .\Mods\The Succession Wars 0.8.2\_HD3_Data to neutralize a yet unresolved race condition between it and the main _HD3_Data folder.

3. Edit .\_HD3_Data\Settings\era.ini to include the following values because the HD launcher may still struggle to correctly save certain settings:

Code:

<OpenGL.Wrapper.Version> = 2 // 16-bit OpenGL by Verok, 32-bit WILL partially break the graphics while anything else is unstable as long as ERA mods are concerned
<OpenGL.FixedRefreshRate> = 1
<OpenGL.Interpolation> = 4 // Lanczos filter because Bilinear Sharper gives an ungodly high contrast that overstrains the eyes in the long run
<OpenGL.Upscaling> = 0 // No upscaling because SmoothSaIx2 muddies some of the intricate dithering patterns on H2 sprites whilst xBRZ looks like ass on wheels outright
<OpenGL.SingleWindow> = 1
<OpenGL.Renderer> = 2 // OpenGL 2 for compatibility with derelict hardware
<OpenGL.UpdateMode> = 1
<OpenGL.SmoothMapScroll> = 1 // This works with ERA lol
<OpenGL.SmoothHeroMove> = 1 // This works with ERA lol
<OpenGL.Aspect> = 1
<OpenGL.VSync> = 1
<OpenGL.Benchmark> = 0
<OpenGL.ShowFPS> = 0

4. Launch the game via HD Launcher at your preferred resolution and enjoy the smooth map scrolling and hero movement

The CPU affinity binding trick could be made into a HD Mod feature. Besides CPU affinity, a massive contributor to random ERA crashes is playing ERA mods together with HD Mod in any rendering mode other than one of Verok's two OpenGL solutions. With certain lucky hardware / driver / OS combinations, you will never need the affinity fix nor ever run into crashes, which makes reliably reproducing this whole class of issues quite difficult. I've mailed all of my above findings to Baratorch (baratorch[at]gmail.com) but got no response so far.

Quote :

The situation is going to the point where I will have to bring the platform transfer suggestion to the team, and I'm not entirely sure it has to be ERA at all.

FYI ERA 3 has had a massive QoL update in August. The only other platform option appears to be a customized SoD executable building upon the foundations of HotA, if they agree to help and cooperate. I guess it's well within their power to implement all the neccessary H2-esque mechanics, and we aren't exactly talking about a lot of stuff (extra features-wise, HotA has probably strayed from SoD way further than H3SW ever aimed for).

P.S. There remain a bunch of H3SW-specific crashes which are 100% reproducible like the game always crashes at a given turn on a given RMG map when doing a certain thing no matter how many times you reload the save or what you do immediately prior to triggering the CTD. Moving the whole game folder over to a different computer won't help either. They appear to be flaws inherent specifically to H3SW scripting and seem to never happen with other ERA mods, but this one kind of crashes are super duper rare... compared to all the CPU affinity / render mode bullshit and how often it strikes (unless fixed as per the above guide).

Thank you for this insight. I will be able to answer to it properly a bit later.

Besides, we are available for faster talk at Discord now:
https://discord.gg/6jAkZggz

Thanks for the invitation but I do my best to stay away from Discord because of the heavy toll it takes on my ability to stay concentrated on my real life tasks. I also usually don't have a lot to say...

BTW there's a rumor (honestly I can't remember where I first read this) that the upcoming Day of Reckoning fan expansion (still pretty much a WIP), despite requiring a separate installation, is going to be built upon a modified HotA executable which would be impossible unless HotA devs were willing to lend a hand, which they seem to be. That's where I got my idea about potentially using HotA codebase as a platform for H3SW. From what I've pieced together, HotA development will be mostly wrapped up after they release two more campaigns for Cove and Factory, except for any future bugfixes obviously. Perhaps the winds are changing so that they will eventually help out some other outstanding projects, and H3SW definitely is one.

H3SW hardly needs that behemoth swiss knife of a platform that ERA is, its feature list is quite tight and clear-cut, the literal opposite of a typical feature creep bonanza that many other mods are. This lands H3SW vision pretty close to that of HotA, if not even more conservative.

/EDIT/ It took me several months to realize that the choice of renderer in HD Mod does affect the random crashes because the probability is wildly affected by the versions of both HD Mod and ERA. Every small update to either of them may affect the severity. An update may fully resolve the issues for some time before the next update makes it one huge disaster once again, rinse and repeat. I have no idea why Verok's OpenGL wrapper doesn't cause this intermittent conflict with ERA at all, but after discovering this back in July I spent several months testing and it seems like it's the solution as long as it's combined with binding the game process to just one core. Resorting to dxwrapper to automate the binding on game launch is clumsy as hell, and Verok's wrappers for Heroes I, II & IV all have this "Single CPU" option exactly because even vanilla versions of those games are prone to random crashes on certain configurations the moment the OS decides to bounce the thread to a different core. For some reason I'm not seeing this option in HD mod. The problem isn't purely HoMM-specific, a number of different old games also suffer from crashes like that, which is exactly where I sourced my initial hypothesis as to the cause and the remedy. SoD and HotA executables seem unaffected, so probably a fix like that in HD Mod was deemed unnecessary because ERA is largely overlooked considered very niche these days and is not even fully supported by Baratorch (it just kinda works, or used to).

/EDIT2/ Many of the old games affected by the problem are also sensitive to whether hyperthreading is enabled in the BIOS settings AND utilized by the operating system. Binding the thread to a single core resolves the issues even on hyperthreaded systems, which a majority of modern PC/OS combos are. This might be somewhat Intel-specific with lots of people on AMD, which is one of the factors why not everybody is affected in the same way. Some recent AMD CPUs do use a form of hyperthreading though, which complicates things even further...

Baratorch has added a setting in 5.4 R84 that, if set to 1, binds the game process to a single core.

It was also discovered that the redundant folder .\Mods\The Succession Wars 0.8.2\_HD3_Data ships with the H3SW installer itself, it should be removed. Baratorch explained that HD Mod is tailored to only use .\_HD3_Data but due to some filesystem hooks in ERA itself, it might collide with .\Mods\The Succession Wars 0.8.2\_HD3_Data which should have never existed in the first place.

Sounds good with the new update, but I am not sure I understand your point about the mod's "_HD3_Data" folder. Currently, it allows us to use our H2 styled interface with HD mod instead of the bundled HD mod interface. Where should these files be placed if not in the mod specific "_HD3_Data" folder?

This is what my UI looks like in H3SW without .\Mods\The Succession Wars 0.8.2\_HD3_Data



Am I missing something?

My own experience has always been that mirroring .\_HD3_Data at .\Mods\The Succession Wars 0.8.2\_HD3_Data breaks the HD mod altogether: it stubbornly will save certain settings to one era.ini and read them from another, and vice versa—seemingly at random! It took me ages and multiple clean reinstalls of everything to finally figure out the culprit, which turned out to be the entire .\Mods\The Succession Wars 0.8.2\_HD3_Data folder. Once gone, everything is back to the expected behavior.

If you were talking about some special H2-themed header logo in the HD mod itself (that I've never noticed) then you should simply ask Baratorch to integrate it. Currently the logo displayed by HD Mod automatically changes between a red one for ERA and a teal one for HotA (I don't remember if it has a variant for plain SoD). I guess the simplest check would be "is an ERA based executable AND executable name starts with H3SW_". Heck, you could even integrate the iconic H2 font to kick in dynamically once HD Mod senses a H3SW installation.

Anyways, here are Baratorch's own words (in Russian):

Quote :

HD мод работает с era.ini ТОЛЬКО в _HD3_Data\Settings. В Эре есть функционал, который перехватывает обращения к файлам и меняет пути. Видимо этот функционал реализован с косяками. Но я над этим функционалом Эры не властен. Обращайтесь к разработчикам эры или SW.

Considering  bigfont.fnt going black in 32bit color:

Quote :

Мне казалось, что в каких-то новых версиях Эры должны были сделать поддержку 32битной картинки для их цветных шрифтов. Но я точно не помню. Попробуйте обратиться с этим к разработчикам Эры или экспертам по ней.

I'm going to reply that the problematic bigfont.fnt is affected in SoD/HotA as well (it vanishes altogether instead of going black like in H3SW) while smalfont.fnt works equallly well in ERA and SoD/HotA running in 32bit color mode.

It looks like it's the bigfont.fnt file itself that's somehow screwed up and not HD Mod or ERA, but guess Baratorch might have some clues as to what's wrong with the file and how to reform it.

I meant that the folder contains the HD mod assets for H3SW, which needs to go in ".\Mods\The Succession Wars 0.8.2\_HD3_Data" for them to be applied on top of the regular HD mod assets.
You are right that when playing without HD mod, the folder is unused.

About the ".\Mods\The Succession Wars 0.8.2\_HD3_Data\Settings\era.ini" file, it should probably be removed for the next release as it seems to be causing more trouble than it solves with the current versions of HD mod.

Now I can finally see what you mean by "H2 themed assets". I wrongly supposed that the totally screwed up colors and missing eye candy in some of the UI elements was "just the beta state" of H3SW similar to how bigfont.fnt gets screwed in 32bit color modes and what not. Now I see that if you keep everything except _HD3_Data\Settings\ you also get a working game with a finalized and polished H2 UI. I grew so accustomed to playing without those assets--because I was barely ever able to run the mod with its specific _HD3_Data override present--that at some point I stopped realizing those assets already were in the game.

There's more to it than just era.ini though. Upon a clean reinstall of H3SW on top of a clean reinstall of Homm3 Complete (GOG), you end up seemingly with just .\Mods\The Succession Wars 0.8.2\_HD3_Data\Settings\era.ini but after a few runs you'll notice files like #common.ini or era#default.ini start popping up in the same folder. They bleed from .\_HD3_Data\Settings\ because of the game attempting to write / copy / read stuff from there, but ending up with its filesystem calls wrongly hooked by ERA. There exists a race condition of sorts somewhere deep under the hood that's hard to describe but impossible not to notice after multiple launches.

If you scrap just the redundant era.ini but leave any of those unwanted files in there, the game will break and refuse to launch at all. Removing the entire "Settings" folder seems to fix things at least for the .ini's. Every read and write now goes to the main .\_HD3_Data\Settings and there alone.

Nevertheless, keeping any sort of asset override in .\Mods\The Succession Wars 0.8.2\_HD3_Data\ will give you occasional ERA-related crashes, on top of all the habitual CPU Affinity and "ini hell" bullshit. It seems like asset override in ERA works 100% of time for any of the stuff handled by the base game but more like 95% of the time for the stuff manipulated by Baratorch's code, and that's purely an ERA issue.

The quickest solution would be to mainline the optional H2 theme (including literally everything like RMG presets, etc.) into the HD Mod itself. Without adding any extra code, could it simply be done by wrapping the needed assets into a HD Mod Plugin like SOD_SP?

P.S. I've just made another clean reinstall of H3 Complete + H3SW + HD Mod R84, and I'm not even able to launch the game at all in any of the GDI or OpenGL modes unless I put < Sys.UseSingleCpuCore > = 1 on the Tweaks tab. When I select one of the ddraw modes, H3SW gets through to the main menu screen and lets me start a new game but sometimes crashes mid-game. < Sys.UseSingleCpuCore > = 1 makes this particular kind of crashes go away, completely. Then, if .\Mods\The Succession Wars 0.8.2\_HD3_Data\ is entirely missing, H3SW becomes stable as rock... SoD & HotA are perfectly stable for me regardless of the Sys.UseSingleCpuCore value. Even without the HD mod, ERA just fails to properly work on certain hardware/OS combos unless you disable hyperthreading or bind the process to a single core. HD mod simply cranks up the severity of those crashes... the latest build now comes with a cure.