Auto-translated
Hello friends. Sorry for the long message. I described my problem in detail. Maybe someone has already encountered this?
As I have been a long-time fan of Heroes 3, and the KB Legion has become boring for me, I decided to reinstall the old, good Heroes 3. Instead of searching for all my game discs, I found an archive online about a year ago containing a compilation (Heroes 3 Complete Edition + but inside there were also folders and files for HotA, but the main menu was from the Complete Edition, and HotA maps were not displayed in the game's map list menu + HDmod + patch for Russian localization 1.5).
Well... I was overjoyed, especially after studying your "Walkthrough of Author's Maps" thread (a separate thank you to those who write there) and seeing how the creative ideas of map authors have progressed, especially the Chinese ones.
I installed it... and "life took on new colors." In general, there were no problems for about 9 months... until November 2019 (approximately). Then I noticed that the "defeat" video had disappeared - the one with the execution. All the frames are in the same place, but instead of the video, there is just a black screen. I thought it was some kind of bug... and didn't pay much attention to it. In November, I decided to replay a map that I couldn't finish before - "Jennifer's Dream Journey." Well, I couldn't finish it... I completed it the first time on my own, without looking anything up, but it took me 39 months, and I couldn't complete 2 battles, so I had to cheat. Therefore, this time I decided to replay it. And then I encountered a new bug near the end of the map. Around the 19th game month (only 6 enemy heroes left to defeat).
So, when reaching a certain cell on the landscape map, the game crashes. A message appears saying that "this should not have happened," and the game closes automatically, generating a report for the HD mod developer.
And this happened every time the hero reached that cell. I was only able to bypass this by doing the following: I start playing some other map, play, save, fight... for about 20 minutes. Then I load the Jennifer save before the crash, and the hero successfully passes that cell (but this doesn't always work). Later on, there were similar crashes on the same map, but during battles, usually either before or immediately after (before the results window appears). In general, I finished it, and that's that.
But now I realize that this is happening on almost all maps. And it has become impossible to play. Considering the experiments I conducted this weekend, the answer to the question "did I do something with the compilation?" is yes, I did. I updated the HD mod (when updates were released), and I couldn't understand why I couldn't pass the beginning of the Chinese Lord of the Rings, but then, with the help of this site, I learned that I also needed to install the SoD SP. So I installed it.
In general, this weekend, suspecting that I had probably messed something up, I decided to figure it out.
First, I unpacked the archive with the game that I downloaded more than a year ago, and put it in a new location, and then I launched it. I copied the latest save where the game crashes constantly into it. I got some results. But to verify them, I decided to experiment again...
I went to the storage room to find not the files downloaded from the internet, but all my collectible versions of the game. There I found both The Shadow of Death separately, and the licensed Golden Collection from Buka with a collection of Heroes 1-4. In general, I downloaded the Complete Edition of Heroes 3 from there. I downloaded it specifically to exclude any negative influence of the HotA files from the internet archive.
So, my final observations are as follows, based on all three versions (the played archive, the newly unpacked archive, and my Golden Collection - a pure The Shadow of Death):
1. The original game (without mods and patches) works everywhere as it should, there are no crashes, and most importantly, all the videos are in place, both in the campaigns and when losing. But I am not satisfied with the resolution!
2. We install HDmod. In all versions, the videos disappear. An error appears (PHOTO 1). After that (if it's a campaign), the standard text description of the campaign "plays" on the screen, but there is no video.
3. BUT!!!!!! We check for crashes in the game. I load saves from maps before the crash (there are many of them now), and, lo and behold, there are no crashes at all.
4. But... what about the original battle maps and the authors' ideas? That's right! We install SoD SP. And everything goes to hell. In addition to the missing videos, there are constant crashes. In PHOTO 2, I have a screenshot of the crash notification, and I am attaching the text report file that is generated.
5. And vice versa. We disable SoD SP, the crashes stop, but there are no videos. We disable HDmod, and the videos are immediately in place.
In addition, I downloaded the HD mod and SoD SP from the official developers' pages (a huge thank you to them for that).
Could it be something with my laptop? Could it be that something needs to be enabled in the HD mod settings?
Dirty_Player
