H3SW v0.8 Beta To-Do List / Список целей на v0.8

Attention! This list is no longer actual for the sake of saving time before the actual release of v0.8.
I am moving the current objectives to our Trello board.
The team members who still don't have accounts will receive an invitation shortly.



Graphics:

- All new creatures having at least 3 necessary animations. Currently 18/21. The miniatures also need some love.

- Completely remade Dervish townscreen in 800x600 with a thin frame. Approximately 85% done. It will probably be on me.
- Completely remade townscreen of the Sorceress faction. Approximately 85% done.
- Witch castle opera theme, MIDI + WAV. 50% done.

- New design for the Dervish castle/town and Witch town on the adventure map. Remains undone. Must be made according to the Dervish actual townscreen structures and castle shape. The color of the current castle might be even okay, but it shouldn't look like a recolored Warlock.

+ Fixed creature backgrounds!
+ Fully designed Witch creatures in static form!
+ All classic terrains re-packed palette-wise!
+ All classic portraits completely remade!
+ Adventure map interface is done!
+ X2 upscale of all 7 resources for the adventure map message window.
+ Faction colors are decided.
+ Knight, Sorceress, Necromancer, Warlock have their new portraits in acceptable quality for v0.8.
+ 4 Witch and 1 Dervish portraits brought to perfection.
+ Witch and Dervish faction and castle icons are designed.
+ Witch castle on the adventure map is designed.
+ New Single Player menu backgrounds are designed.
+ New Main Menu Background is designed.
+ New Loading Screen is designed.
+ All classic terrain objects re-packed with proper flags, palette, grid position and passability.
+ New design for the project logo in HD.
+ Multi-colored fonts!
+ All secondary skill icons in 44x44, Basic-Advanced-Expert. 28/28 done!
+ Completely remade Knight towsncreen in 800x600 with a thin frame.
+ All PoL portraits resized.
+ All new portraits at least in a poor-to-medium quality. See Portrait topic for details (some fixes won't hurt, Ragoon took the task).
+ Artifacts are generally done, but fixes won't hurt.

Update: 26.XII.17 by Orzie


Programming:


- Стены типа "форт" на боевых экранах гарнизонов. Террейн в бою хз, там как получится - в идеале он должен всегда меняться в зависимости от того, где стоит гарнизон.

- Организация версии как кастрированной Эры со своим list.txt, не зависящим от настроек собственно эровского менеджера модов. Иначе говоря - h3sw.exe, который загружает всегда только одну комбинацию модов - сам проект и вог под ним, будь там хоть апокалипсис на дворе. При этом сам мод точно так же кладётся в Mods/The Succession Wars и внешним инструментарием Эры можно запускать его как и раньше при помощи Era.exe.

- Новые эффекты от артефактов: пилим только двоечные пока. Также заменяем Гром Титанов на Доспехи Андурана, 4 компонента будет, эффект от них двоечный.

- Работающий, мативо, патченный редактор. Но это не так злободневно, как пункты выше.


+ Color cycling for oceans and rivers!
+ Multi-colored flags
+ Dynamic castle looks on different terrains
+ ITPA and ITPB icons differentiation
+ New Artifact System
+ Custom Map Directory
+ Various minor Era plug-ins
+ Multi-colored fonts!
+ Rearranged creatures
+ Creature abilities (may need some fixes)
+ Standing animation
+ Properly arranged creatures
+ Correct town build-orders
+ Hero Specialties (some in WIP state though)
+ Hero Secondary Skills

First of all I would like to thank you for making this list. I really is needed for our project with a list of what has been done and what still is left. I know you for a long time have wanted a change log as much as I did and I hope this thread can act like one for us on the team.

Secondly, I have come a little longer with the scaling of the portraits than you write here. I have currently made the knight (partly some portraits was made by others), the sorceress, the wizard and the warlock and I am currently around half done with the barbarian portraits, so I guess it is around 4,5/6 I will continue until also the necromancer portraits are done.

Yeah, this list will be truly helpful I think that changing PoL portraits is unnecessary. Currently we can use them as placeholders for almost every town.

Orzie, are you still going to finish dirt objects? I can do it in day, maybe two. Another question is, are we going to transfere orange rock with beach(underground)? Or as you've said before, we will leave it, but use script on random maps? (I remember your words about new mountains, so I won't touch them for now).

Uhm wrote:

Orzie, are you still going to finish dirt objects? I can do it in day, maybe two.

It seems that I will not return to this task. You have proven to deal with it much more effectively, so I would be glad if you re-made all Dirt objects. Your trees are amazing - I tested them in game and they are finally stacking properly. I also dream about new Sawmills with different types of trees, that would be really amazing.

Uhm wrote:

Another question is, are we going to transfere orange rock with beach(underground)?

Orange terrain (wasteland) can stay as-is. It will be generated on the surface (feanor can make it do so), and it will not be generated underground. Only classic Heroes 3 maps will have it that way, and we will be likely to re-draw the underground terrain to Sand manually. Wasteland will be taking place of former H3 underground, yes, but it will not be associated with underground anymore.

Uhm wrote:

Or as you've said before, we will leave it, but use script on random maps? (I remember your words about new mountains, so I won't touch them for now).

The new default terrain for underground will be the Sand. I will make new stalagmite-like mountains and mines as terrain obstacles specific for underground. They should not be generated on the surface. I will ask feanor if it's possible to make certain objects generate only underground.
We can also make standard "sandy mountains". As you remember, there weren't any in Heroes 2, Sand terrain utilized Desert mountains.

I can reassign the task of making Sand mountains to you if you wish - I still have a lot of headache with Knight and Dervish townscreens. The Sand mountains, like I said, can be in 2 variants: stalagmite-like mountains for the underground and recolored desert-like mountains for the surface.

Fred79 from Heroes community even managed to recolor those for Heroes 3. I can ask him to do so for Heroes 2 so we can save efforts.

Hello everybody, this is fried brain. I've been in contact with Orzie for a while, but never started working at all

I'm a pixel art noob, but I think I could make some little assets for practice. Also, I'm from Argentina, so I speak spanish (just in case you need some translations).

PD: Sorry if not the correct thread. I downloaded the palette already and read "don't use colors 0-9 and 247-255 in the given palette" somewhere in the forum, so I'm ready to work!
**Sorry about the down vote, I don't know how to fix it

Greetings friedbrain, it's awesome to see you here!

I suggest you to try secondary skill icons or adventure map dwellings.

For the first, let's proceed to the secondary skill icon development thread. The second message from top to bottom features a selection of icons which are "already done" or need some improvement. If you want to try to make additional icons for the rest of the Secondary Skills, let me know in that thread so I will be able to assist you with the original game resources.

The second position for you features preferably creature dwellings on the adventure map. See the upper posts in this thread where we conversed with tophatchild. If you are ready to try them and you have already read the upper posts carefully (concerning the guidelines), leave me a message in the Adventure Map Objects topic so I will be able to send you the original Heroes 2 graphics as a reference.

Gentlemen, I updated the to-do list.
First, I am glad to announce that we have 3 new Secondary skills for the release in great quality, thanks to DrSlash and others. Same goes for great Uhm's work on the classic adventure map objects - this development was colossal.

Second, I suggest leaving the creature animations for the future releases. We can put static forms as defs and program the required stats/skills for them so people will be already able to test the new gameplay and produce actual screenshots without many placeholder creatures making bad advertisement for the project.

Third, the static forms for creatures still need lots of love. There are the Dervish Faction General Concept and Witch Lineup threads which feature WIP creatures.

Fourth, the project logo is currently being developed by Ashirox. I am glad he responded to my request. The draft for the new logo put in our new Main Menu can be seen here (ATTENTION - WIP/OUTDATED GRAPHICS). I hope to hear more good news from Ashirox in future.

Sounds good, Orzie.
I am sorry about my lack of progression the last weeks. I just moved to another place and haven't found the time to work on the graphics I promised. I do though still think I will have them ready in time.

Can I also ask you if you didn't update the "remade classic portraits" number because you don't find some of them unfinished or if it just went by you unnoticed, that I am done with both the knight, the sorceress, the wizard and the warlock and is about half way with the barbarian portraits.

I gladly announce that all Secondary Skill icons in 44x44 can be considered done for the v0.8 beta. Many still need treatment, but what we already have is acceptable to put in the game and start closed beta testing (when other graphics will be also more or less done).

We've also got progress in graphics on almost every other aspect in the to-do list, which is definitely quite an achievement.

I will try to put more effort in the following weeks so some of the aspects which were claimed by me long ago will finally be done as well.

Good work, guys.

List updated. It's now clear that we are really close to the release, and let's hope that we can do something more (with the adventure map objects, for example), while feanor does his necessary part of the programming magic.

To-Do list updated. Since the work now is being carried out mostly in a closed mode, there are not much updates on the forum as well as no bug descriptions posted. The graphics discussion can be still carried out on the forum though.

Attention! This list is no longer actual for the sake of saving time before the actual release of v0.8.
I am moving the current objectives to our Trello board.
The team members who still don't have accounts will receive an invitation shortly.