Is H3:SW 0.8 stable without using HD mod

Hey guys, really enjoying the mod so far. I have a quick question, though. It seems that everybody uses SW with HD mod installed (me as well as it was part of the installation guide). The thing is that I enjoy the game better if I start h3sw.exe and not the hd_launcher. I prefer to play it low res and HD mode gives me a Hmm3 cursor and tons of other Hmm3 UI elements. On my machine h3sw.exe is kind of unstable and makes bugs from time to time. Are you suppose to play the mode only via the hd launcher or the h3sw.exe is stable enough on your machines?

P.S. Another small question that I'll type here. I'm a bigger fan of The Price of Loyalty soundtrack (cause that's what I used to play since I was a kid). So naturally the first thing that came to my mind was to replace the "town" .mp3 files in the mod folder. That worked perfectly when I run SW via the HD launcher. But again I ran into some issues (music in towns became noise and glitches although I did an exact copy of filenames and info) when I tried to play it via the normal h3sw.exe

Any suggestions? (and if I repeat someone feel free to delete my thread and point me to the right direction)

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I prefer to play it low res and HD mode gives me a Hmm3 cursor and tons of other Hmm3 UI elements.

This feature can be turned off like many other HD Mod developments. Search in the Tweaks tab, there are the options you seek.

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On my machine h3sw.exe is kind of unstable and makes bugs from time to time. Are you suppose to play the mode only via the hd launcher or the h3sw.exe is stable enough on your machines?

On my PC, I also have a lot of problems with launching standard h3sw.exe when HD Mod is present. This is due to some incompatibilities related to patcher_x86.dll file. Some other team members don't experience problems and launch the game just fine, so it all seems to be OS-specific.

I honestly hope that feanor, who is the mod programmer, will revise the code part which stops the mod from being launchable without HD Mod. For now though, it seems that everyone has the WINGRAPH.CPP problem and is forced to install HD Mod over v0.8.0 release.

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P.S. Another small question that I'll type here. I'm a bigger fan of The Price of Loyalty soundtrack (cause that's what I used to play since I was a kid). So naturally the first thing that came to my mind was to replace the "town" .mp3 files in the mod folder. That worked perfectly when I run SW via the HD launcher. But again I ran into some issues (music in towns became noise and glitches although I did an exact copy of filenames and info) when I tried to play it via the normal h3sw.exe

HD Mod uses an updated version of MP3DEC.ASI library for Heroes 3, so the sounds are generally more stable there. I don't know how to fix your problem right now, probably the problem would be gone if you didn't install HD Mod at all, but, as I said above, v0.8.0 is not launching without it.

You can try to put 128 kbps or even 88 kbps tracks to the game and see if it treats them right.

Orzie wrote:

This feature can be turned off like many other HD Mod developments. Search in the Tweaks tab, there are the options you seek.

Thanks, maybe this will solve all my problems!

badlemon wrote:

Orzie wrote:

This feature can be turned off like many other HD Mod developments. Search in the Tweaks tab, there are the options you seek.

Thanks, maybe this will solve all my problems!

Yeah, I can pretty much guarantee it should. I had the same concerns, but you can adjust the settings such that it's more or less indistinguishable from vanilla Heroes III. The HD Mod can merely act as a front-end that has whatever "behind the scenes" code that keeps the game stable.

In the upcoming v0.8.1 release we fixed most of the issues, so HD Mod will not be necessary.

However, if you are up for more possibilities, including the custom template random map generation, you will have to install it anyway.
Also, some sound-related crashes still might occur without HD Mod.

Using it w/o HD mod for now and it works fine.

Of course it does.

The problem of the initial v0.8.0 build was connected with some coding issues so it basically required HD Mod to be working.
We fixed the problem for v0.8.1 so people now don't have to use HD Mod at all.

However, I still recommend it because the settings are adjustable, and HD Mod brings several good features like the custom RMG template menu and adjustable resolution. You can turn off the <UI.HiRezCore> tweak in the settings file if you don't like some graphical additions of HD Mod advanced interfaces, still getting the mentioned custom template menu and (probably) increased stability on newer systems.