Adding a Faction?

Hi, this is The Succession Wars Mod team coordinator speaking. You might probably remember me.

I've got some graphic examples which cannot be used in The Succession Wars Mod for the reasons of game lore.
However, I still want them to become more than fanart, probably. I sympathize the Heroes 2 style, so primarily I would like to invent this new faction on the Heroes 2 basis. I may also use these assets for H3SW, but later and on a non-official basis.

So my question is: is it possible to add a new faction (the Cyborg) using Project Ironfist?



And some sub-questions:
- adding a campaign with the same interface window and campaign bonuses like classic campaigns;

- making the heroes of the new Cyborg faction being hireable only in Cyborg castles (with no other heroes being hireable there);

- allowing to enable/disable the possibility to choose Cyborg class in the map editor for each player;

- renaming Kastore as Seymour, leaving the same portrait;

- replacing Maximus with Lord Haart, moving Maximus to the new Cyborg faction. Lord Haart's portrait will be graphically restyled for H2.



Here are some examples. I didn't polish them, so put them only for demonstration. If I will have a chance to create a full faction, I will bring them to perfection later.

The fans of the old school Might and Magic series will definitely recognize these assets.

Welcome back, Orzie!

Yes, it is possible, but these will all require some amounts of custom coding.

The things involving heroes should be fairly easy, and will only require small changes. Adding a new campaign will be significantly harder but still doable.

For me, the most interesting question is how to actually create a new castle type and make it usable. I think we're fairly close to being able to do this, but I've never had the art to actually try it.

I'm very interested in seeing a new faction added to the game, so I can work closely with you on this. If you're interested, let's set up a chat.

Admin edit: A post by Orzie was accidentally omitted when copying from the old forum. It has been inserted here:

Orzie's post:

Yeah, we can use facebook for example. It is a convenient messenger for me.

Basically, adding a new faction means a mod release and subsequent stream of promotion, which would be nice for such project as PI. The only possible problem is that my Cyborg is a tribute to the sci-fi background of the Might and Magic universe, while many homm2 players are against such concepts in a fantasy game.

I don't care though I develop this concept solely and don't depend on anyone. A good quality of graphics can still attract a lot of people to it.


Well, adding a new faction is a dream for heroes 2, basically. I still hope it is possible - I am capable of doing all the necessary graphic assets and a campaign story, it will just take a good while.

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Darmani's post

Cool. I looked up your E-mail address and added you on Facebook (I'm James Koppel). Talk to you soon.

Alright, I will be posting updates in this thread. The closest one should be the hero battle form.

Well, here is the preliminary version of the hero battle form. Still need to check the palette and how this fits to H2, especially near other heroes.

Oh. It fits badly to a dark site background. Viewing on a white background looks a ton better.

Nicely done. Much in the Heroes 2 graphic style.

The Cyborg hero is quite intriguing.
I wait for a long campaign with many twists. ;-)

I hope this can be easily implemented to allow modding for future towns.
I would love to have an Heroes 3 inspired Inferno town in Heroes 2. ;-)

Thanks. Yeah, the main target was to reform the Heroes 3 concept and make many references to Might and Magic 1-5, which is the parental game for Heroes 1-2 and has similar graphics.

So that, I took the concept of the MM3-5 main antagonist, Sheltem the Dark, and made a Cyborg hero concept based on it.

I think, the campaign story can probably feature the good old friends Sheltem and Corak, but this time set on the world of Enroth.

Quote :

I would love to have an Heroes 3 inspired Inferno town in Heroes 2. ;-)

Well, this town is in works for another project - HoMM3 The Succession Wars Mod. We have reached some good results with it, and plan to make new campaigns based on Might and Magic VI storyline and beyond.



However, if I would be to create an Inferno-style town for Project Ironfist, I think I will go another way, to provide originality for both projects.

Wonderful demons!

I will suggest to add a tad more contrast for your basic Demon, it seem a bit flat, especially the arm and the torso.

When are you planning to have some concret stuff for your Cyborg faction?

An idea for the special building for the Cyborg faction, the capacity to forge an artifact once a week (Artifacts Forge), would be nice and really specific.

Or have you already planned sometime else?

Quote :

However, if I would be to create an Inferno-style town for Project Ironfist, I think I will go another way, to provide originality for both projects.

I hope you make them soon after the Cyborg faction. ;-)

My vision of Inferno based on Heroes 3 faction: http://www.ironfi.st/forum/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=20

The Cyborg faction is already featured on Ironfist wiki. I hope to be able to finish the static assets to April, but who knows.

I didn't plan radical gameplay changes because there are not so many people desiring it. Instead, I guess, a new faction in the same H2 graphic style with the related campaigns will be enough. It's already hard for many people to understand sci-fi in Heroes, so further bashing the classics will be intolerable.

Coding is proceeding as well. I guess it's probably time to share this:



(Natasha portrait and knight graphics used as placeholders; from the game's perspective, she's really a cyborg.)

By the way, you can use this portrait as the Cyborg portrait placeholder



I converted it to H2 palette and checked in the game for consistency.
I may get back to it to vary the background and improve the color transitions, but now we have a portrait to test.

(for some reason the forum bb code buttons don't work)
https://www.dropbox.com/s/s68n786gt4uhg8d/Sheltem.bmp?dl=0


Oops, some colors belong to the cycling spectra. I will replace them with proper ones a bit later.

Finally, a working portrait which is more or less H2-ish. Will need some polishment later, but it's already okay for presentation. I had to delete all maintenance colors, and some bright spots disappeared, but it looks like native to H2 anyway. Too bad H2 palette is so limited.

The Cyborg's static battle form is finished. It supports palette cycling animation.

Now things will be easier.

And the first rough animation is done. He is not very pleased with my animation skills.

Second animation, even worse than the first. It requires its own frame order. Fixes will follow later.

Final version of the hero. This is how he looks in the game.

Hooray! More blink blink ! ( I've got nothing against it. Looks great!)

Well, I just enjoyed the cycling color feature in Heroes 2 at that time because I had just learned how to use it

That thread comes from the beginning of 2015, and the post was in April.

Yeah, I've got the feeling I've seen it somewhere...

Project Ironfist official forum is moving to Forums of Enroth just like ours. I hope to achieve the maximum amount of people here by attracting them with a lot of different Heroes 2-related activities at once to encourage them to register. With this, we will be able to find more people for development and good chit-chat