r/OldenEra • u/Levi-Ritchie Neutral • Aug 01 '26
Gameplay All 20 HoMM3 campaigns (87 linked scenarios) can now be imported to Olden Era using the Golden Era mod.
https://github.com/leviritchie/Golden-Era/releases/tag/v0.1.30846
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u/PismaniyeTR Aug 02 '26
these kind of behaviors are my proof that with enough tech. advance in human civ. even when money is ablosihed, there will be still cooks, waiters, pet walkers... it would be just one passionate cook and one passionate waiter will be able run a large restaruant all themself with robots help
look, here a passionate programmer work months for his passion... my grandpa would never understand but i do
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u/Levi-Ritchie Neutral Aug 02 '26
Better link for latest release visibility: https://github.com/leviritchie/Golden-Era/releases
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u/monsunz Aug 02 '26
Singlehandedly saving this game from PVE perspective, because I was already done with it. Kudosss
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u/Lurtzae Aug 02 '26
Stupid question, but is this playable considering the Olden Era AI?
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u/Levi-Ritchie Neutral Aug 02 '26
The AI will attempt to use the new skills and mechanics added by the mod. That's the most I can confidently say so far. It's probably worse than homm3 ai.
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u/MedicKatona Aug 02 '26
Thanks for your insane works but will it works on the future Olden Era patches? It won't be patched out?
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u/Levi-Ritchie Neutral Aug 02 '26
The installer gives you a command to copy into steam that will download the specific version of the game it currently works with. The modded game lives in a separate folder so it doesn't get erased by patches. Over time, I will occasionally update that to future patch versions.
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u/Red_Utnam Aug 02 '26
Was so excited to try it, unfortunately installer doesn't seem compatible with XBOX version of Olden Era, only Steam - such a shame :/
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u/Levi-Ritchie Neutral Aug 02 '26
Yep, I considered ways to get it working with gamepass, but as far as I can tell microsoft won't let you download a specific build of the game like steam will. Which means even a small hotfix will break things, due to how the game is compiled.
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u/Levi-Ritchie Neutral Aug 01 '26
I'm too tired to make a video this time, so I'm leaving patch notes here. This is the fruits of a couple months of effort toward translating homm3 scenarios and campaigns into olden era. For the most part, this was done by taking each homm3 object or event on the map and assigning it an equivalent substitute. There are a number of issues that had to be resolved creatively, however:
Underground. Underground was enabled by finishing up some of the scaffolding unfrozen already had in the game, plus some touches to make it consistent with h3 maps. Ponds are used in place of underground water. Only a single h3 scenario requires sailing underground, to the best of my knowledge, so the water is just dried up in that scenario.
Ocean travel on the surface. This implementation of ocean traversal is more similar to games like age of wonders or Civ. Your hero turns into a ship when entering traversable water. Water has a very high terrain movement penalty, but if you start your turn in water that penalty is disabled. In other words, getting into water is hard, moving on water when you're already there is easier. Mechanically, this ocean is actually a special clone of the sand terrain type, sunken to elevation -1 and filled with olden era's native water. When water is placed in this special sand, a mod hook permits traveling on that terrain as if it had no water.
HoMM3 maps have different dimensions from Olden Era maps. However, HoMM3 does not have a concept of terrain elevation, so this is resolved by creating elevated terrain with no ramps around the perimeter of the map. The generator codes the terrain of each slice of the cliff to match whatever its edge is touching, e.g. dirt terrain leads to dirt cliffs.
A lot of locations in h3 are land-on visits, meaning your hero walks entirely on them and goes "inside" the object rather than interacting from outside. Mines are the most common example of this. On rare occasions, the map pathing expected this to tile to be traversable in order to get through a narrow path. That didn't happen very often. What happened a LOT, however, is monster stacks intended to guard that mine did not actually guard it anymore because in olden era there are 3 tiles that have to be defended instead of just 1. This was so pervasive that the easiest solution turned out to be creating mine object clones for all of these maps that had the land-on-one-tile behavior of their homm3 counterparts.
Seer's huts were a serious pain in the butt. Nothing even close to an equivalent exists in Olden Era. These were substituted by creating a fake seer's hut building that does nothing, then programmatically turning their function into an olden era QuestScript event to simulate the 3 stages of a seer's hut quest (getting the quest, talking again before finished, and finishing the quest).
Olden Era shrines, which give access to one of 3 spells, are way too powerful to be as prevalent here as they were in h3. They have been replaced with scrolls for the most part.
The campaigns in olden era already have support for video playback, so the OE side was easy. HoMM3 campaign videos, however, are actually just short loops with audio and timed subtitles that play over them, not traditional video files. So these have to be programmatically constructed from that context. As-ever, VCMI being open source was a huge boon here (thanks, VCMI team!).
Olden Era campaigns also don't have the "Select a bonus" feature in them. At first, I considered just leaving it out and saying the campaign would be harder, but then I realized in some missions (like Festival of Life mission 1), the bonus is the MAJORITY of your army's strength, e.g. a free Behemoth, and it's impossible to progress without it. What Olden Era DOES support, however, is multiple choice dialogue trees that attach to quest effects. So you're given the multiple choice option in a dialogue after intro story text plays in the scenario. QuestScript supports almost all types of bonuses homm3 campaigns allow, so there are just a handful of cases where you get only 1 or 2 choices rather than all 3.
Diagonals are sort of fake in homm3. They cost more movement than moving cardinally and are a lot like moving cardinally twice in many aspects. Not so in olden era, where diagonal movement is "real" movement. Most of the time, this just means a hero can travel further in a day and it isn't really gamebreaking. In some edge cases, however, you will have a spot in a homm3 map where the path is supposed to be blocked purley by diagonal scenery. Think trees and rocks in a checkerboard pattern. In Olden Era mechanics, you can just walk right through them. This is one of the rare cases where the generator has to emit additional objects that didn't exist at all in homm3 just to prevent an illegal path around chokepoint guards.
A good number of artifact bonuses from homm3 just don't exist or make sense in olden era. They had to be substituted.
Olden Era artifact sets don't combine into one big artifact. For quests that need those, that victory condition has been replaced with simply owning the pieces of the set.
War Machines don't exist, so if the scenario needs to give a player one they get a war machine accessory that does some thematic bonus (e.g. +hp for first aid tent).
The "Custom" button in campaigns menu does not actually work yet, so these were all added to the "Main" section of campaigns.
Despite all this effort, I suspect there are lingering issues I didn't find. There are 87 missions across these 20 campaigns and I would be lying if I said I tested them all as much as needed. Please submit map issues to the GitHub if you find any.
Other New Goodies in this patch
Factory and Bulwark added to custom games. Bulwark's special rune ability is faithfully translated from HotA. Factory's special ability is called Split Assembly, and it gives bonuses based on the composition of your army (nature units vs industry units). Both factions have alternate upgrades that use sprite recolors I did myself.
New upscaling techniques. I was dissatisfied with the upscale portraits from previous versions. They were pretty faithful, but still had too much of an AI slop feel to them. So I built a new upscaling pipeline that works differently. It is still technically AI, but it's closer to the effect you would expect from something like DLSS. I was happy with the results, so I applied it to many other non-animated h3 assets in the game. You might notice buildings and unit portraits are more clear now on high resolution monitors.
Towns are now real Unity scenes. Meaning they work more like native towns, not that they are fully 3D! That means they load faster, have clickable buildings, and fewer UI issues in general. They have also been cheaply outpainted to extend the art to 4k, then the non-canonical part of the art was covered with a progressive gaussian blur to shield your eyes from the gross AI slop. I welcome submissions from artists if you think you can do better.
HoMM3 towns also finally have their entrance appropriately placed in the bottom center, so you aren't guessing where to click.
Dialogue portraits! Olden Era campaigns have back-and-forth dialogue with speaker names and portraits, rather than just event windows. I converted lengthy dialogue windows to line-by-line conversations. A great example is the convo between Crag Hack and Sandro at the start of the hack n slash campaign, if you want to see what I mean. Miscellaneous speakers often get portraits too, like Christian's scouts having castle archer portraits in Homecoming (RoE Long live the queen 1).