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Greetings to all!
It's been quite some time since the release of Heroes IV, yet not many mods and add-ons have been released for the game. One such long-awaited mod, or even a patch, is the HD Mod. In this thread, I'd like to gather everything most useful and necessary for this wonderful game.
Score Calculation Program - allows you to quickly calculate how long, for example, you need to play a map (Heroes IV) to accumulate a certain number of points. It also provides some other useful information.
Score Calculation Program - a utility for calculating points on a map, simulating key presses when selecting battlefield terrain, a save scanner for the presence and location of artifacts and magic schools, and quick access to cheat codes.
Spell Calculator - a utility for calculating a spell's effect depending on the hero's "power level".
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Rename Autosafe - a program for renaming autosaves.
Heroes IV SaveEditor - a program that perfectly edits resources. Hero editing functions are not yet fully operational, but work is underway to fix this gap.
SafeEdit - a utility for editing "save files".
Heroes IV resource explorer - a utility for extracting campaigns, music, videos, graphic and text files from Heroes IV resource files.Heroes IV FaceKit - A utility for adding new heroes and editing existing ones.
It does not save the gray rectangle, but creates a black frame around the image. Easy to use...
has extra features, such as the ability to check how powerful a spell will be with various hero configurations. For example, if you want to know how many devils you can summon with a hero of level x, "SpellBook" makes this very easy, unlike creating a map using the campaign editor. Besides changing the hero's level, you can change the hero's skills to make the spell more powerful.
Another great aspect is the "spell lore". Have you ever wanted to read those juicy descriptions that 3do wrote for each spell and never got around to reading them all (if there is)? Well, please take a few minutes of your time, and with "Spellbook" you can have fun reading them. Take my word for it, they are cute.
How to use
- To read a spell description, you can either press and hold the left mouse button (when you release the button, the description disappears), or press the right mouse button (you need to close the description this way by pressing again).
- To read a spell's "lore", press "?" next to the spell using the technique described above.
- Most of the "book tabs" are functional (spell school tabs, spell type tabs).
Here are the exceptions:
"All spells" (marked with "?»
Replaced by the "About" window.
"Combat spells" (marked with "H» replaced by the "Hero Screen".
- In the Hero-Screen, things get a bit more complex. You can improve a skill by clicking in the corresponding corner (see tooltips). To decrease a skill level, you can click the same corner. If you want to remove a skill, press CTRL + Click. You will notice that when you change a skill level, others might change too. This is natural.
Other features
- When you remove a skill (or decrease it, for that matter), some spells will become unavailable.
Using the mod:
To change the image aspect ratio and select the correct resolution, follow these steps:
- switch to windowed mode in the game via the game's settings menu or by pressing the F4 key
- in the top window menu, select Mod-> Resolution Mod-> Aspect Ratio and choose your mode (see example)
- restart the game
- go to the game's settings menu and select your resolution.
Installation:
- Download the appropriate SFX file for your game
- Run this file and extract its contents to the game root folder.
- Launch the game
It's been quite some time since the release of Heroes IV, yet not many mods and add-ons have been released for the game. One such long-awaited mod, or even a patch, is the HD Mod. In this thread, I'd like to gather everything most useful and necessary for this wonderful game.
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HoMM-4 Reference Guide - a detailed reference guide on all aspects of the game (author dnaop-wr aka Boris Rovkov)
Game Manual - game materials and manual, mostly in English
Quest Guide - a tutorial on creating quests for Heroes IV
Game Manual - game materials and manual, mostly in English
Quest Guide - a tutorial on creating quests for Heroes IV
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Program for calculating development points - a file for calculating army strength for joining creatures using the Charm skillScore Calculation Program - allows you to quickly calculate how long, for example, you need to play a map (Heroes IV) to accumulate a certain number of points. It also provides some other useful information.
Score Calculation Program - a utility for calculating points on a map, simulating key presses when selecting battlefield terrain, a save scanner for the presence and location of artifacts and magic schools, and quick access to cheat codes.
Spell Calculator - a utility for calculating a spell's effect depending on the hero's "power level".
======================
Heroes IV SaveEditor - a program that perfectly edits resources. Hero editing functions are not yet fully operational, but work is underway to fix this gap.
SafeEdit - a utility for editing "save files".
Usage
Allows you to edit basic hero parameters. Usage: select a saved game via File - Open. Then Hero - Find, and in the panel that appears, enter the name of the hero whose parameters you want to edit. After that, on the Hero Magic tab, you can "check" any spells you want to make available to the hero. The Heroes tab offers more options: here you can set the hero's level and class, set their experience points, and choose any combination of levels for primary and secondary skills. After all manipulations, don't forget to save the game via File - Save (or better via File - Save As, entering a new save name, because, as the author writes: "The editor is in deep alpha, so I'm not responsible for any incidents, including hard drive formatting, skyscraper collapses, and alien landings").Heroes IV resource explorer - a utility for extracting campaigns, music, videos, graphic and text files from Heroes IV resource files.
Usage
unzip the zip archive and run the exe file. You can browse through the heroes available in Heroes IV by clicking the arrow in the top-left corner of the screen. You can obviously change the hero's class and gender, as well as their name and biography. Portraits are a bit more complex: Editing a portrait: press Copy to copy the portrait to the Clipboard, from where you can extract it in any graphics editor. Edit the image, send it to the Clipboard, from where you can import it using Paste. This operation should be done for both portrait sizes (Large Face and Small Face). Adding a new portrait: prepare two bmp images in advance: Large Face - 82x82 and Small Face - 52x52. Then they are loaded into the utility by pressing the Load button. After all operations, don't forget to save the hero by pressing Save. A whole gallery of new hero portraits (156 pieces) can be found there======================
Heroes IV Map Enchanter v.2.2 - a utility for copying maps, allows you to copy part of a map to a new map, create a dump file, and process scripts in a more convenient form.Heroes 4 Minimap capturer - a program for saving minimaps.
Description
The program saves the minimap (from the map editor) in BMP.It does not save the gray rectangle, but creates a black frame around the image. Easy to use...
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Spellbook - in-game spellbook [eng] Description
The program reproduces the spellbook from Heroes 4. Additionally, ithas extra features, such as the ability to check how powerful a spell will be with various hero configurations. For example, if you want to know how many devils you can summon with a hero of level x, "SpellBook" makes this very easy, unlike creating a map using the campaign editor. Besides changing the hero's level, you can change the hero's skills to make the spell more powerful.
Another great aspect is the "spell lore". Have you ever wanted to read those juicy descriptions that 3do wrote for each spell and never got around to reading them all (if there is)? Well, please take a few minutes of your time, and with "Spellbook" you can have fun reading them. Take my word for it, they are cute.
How to use
- To read a spell description, you can either press and hold the left mouse button (when you release the button, the description disappears), or press the right mouse button (you need to close the description this way by pressing again).
- To read a spell's "lore", press "?" next to the spell using the technique described above.
- Most of the "book tabs" are functional (spell school tabs, spell type tabs).
Here are the exceptions:
"All spells" (marked with "?»
Replaced by the "About" window."Combat spells" (marked with "H»
replaced by the "Hero Screen".- In the Hero-Screen, things get a bit more complex. You can improve a skill by clicking in the corresponding corner (see tooltips). To decrease a skill level, you can click the same corner. If you want to remove a skill, press CTRL + Click. You will notice that when you change a skill level, others might change too. This is natural.
Other features
- When you remove a skill (or decrease it, for that matter), some spells will become unavailable.
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HD Mod v.1.51- a long-awaited mod for playing on widescreen monitors - similar to such a mod for Heroes 3, makes the map full-screen, and battles in a separate window [Developer's website]Description
The mod allows you to play Heroes of Might and Magic IV on 16:9, 16:10 screens. It is based on HoMM IV GL Wrapper, so it uses it. The downloadable file already includes the latest version of the GL Wrapper, so you don't need to download it separately.Using the mod:
To change the image aspect ratio and select the correct resolution, follow these steps:
- switch to windowed mode in the game via the game's settings menu or by pressing the F4 key
- in the top window menu, select Mod-> Resolution Mod-> Aspect Ratio and choose your mode (see example)
- restart the game
- go to the game's settings menu and select your resolution.
Installation:
- Download the appropriate SFX file for your game
- Run this file and extract its contents to the game root folder.
- Launch the game
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Graphic Wrapper - a program, a Graphic Wrapper for correct operation on new OSes, supports various image rendering modesDescription
The Graphic Wrapper translates graphics to OpenGL for correct operation on new OSes. Originally, the game rendered the image in fullscreen mode via DirectDraw (DDRAW.DLL), and in windowed mode using the old software renderer (WinG32.DLL) (only for HoMM I and II). Sometimes in the past, issues arose due to the absence of WinG32.DLL in the system. Therefore, I decided to make a wrapper as a replacement for WinG32.DLL, for subsequent injections into the game code. The wrapper does not change the screen resolution to 640x480 and simply stretches the image to full screen. But in this case, the wrapper does not preserve the 4:3 aspect ratio and simply stretches everything to fill the screen. I haven't decided to fix this yet, as I wanted to replace the game code as little as possible.Installation:
- Unpack the archive into the game folder.
Features:
- Image is rendered via OpenGL
- Game correctly switches between fullscreen and windowed modes
- Fullscreen mode works at the desktop resolution
- Added frame counter for performance monitoring
- Game does not consume all CPU resources
- Added xRBz filter (only if OpenGL 3.0+ is supported)
- Choice of three filtering types: Nearest neighbor (off), Linear filtering, and xRBz
Hotkeys
- F2 - toggle frame counter on/off
- F3 - toggle image filtering (cycle: Nearest (off), Linear, xRBz)
- F4 - windowed/fullscreen mode. This combination was already present in the game, just a reminder
- F5 - toggle 4:3 aspect ratio preservation.
