Posts from NCF - Special Edition

I just downloaded almost all of these creatures and am already preparing to edit them to fit my NCF pack. Huge thanks for the work and for making them separate; all that's left is to change the IDs. Everything works, even on top of my mods; everything opens and doesn't lag!

Could you provide more details about your "NCF pack"?

Hello, judging by the screenshot, does this mod include these creatures?

https://heroes3wog.net/heroes-vii-jednotky-frakcie-xel/

Great job!
What I didn't like (it's a minor thing, but) is the icon backgrounds. The default ones have artistic backgrounds from the mod, but the new ones don't!

Also, in my opinion, I've never seen the point in having too many different creatures/heroes. You'll never encounter them all, and the balance will be annoying xD

It would be very good to use this later in Heroes 8, if there will be one, of course.

What if you made "Heroes 8" using Heroes 5?

The engine would be the same as in Heroes 5, but there would be new features and other interesting things, and new creatures based on the creatures from Heroes 5?

2 **Ron54**
Once you learn how to work with the executable file, there will be plenty of people with suggestions and requests – you can be sure of it. So, go for it 😁
Sorry for the sarcasm, but in Heroes of Might and Magic V, everything boils down to the fact that many things are hidden in the executable file, and working with it is not easy, and there are few people who know how to do it. There are a couple of modders who are slowly working on it, but they are working on their own projects, with their own vision, and they will not be distracted by general requests that have not even been tested or compiled into a single design document.

What should I do if, when trying to launch the map NCF - Special Edition_2021-02-21.h5m, the loading process freezes halfway and the game crashes?

I've tried launching it separately from all other mods, as well as with all of them enabled.

How do I install it? Is there an instruction manual?

The relevance of this post is questionable, but who knows, maybe it will be useful to someone. A couple of years ago, I decided to refine this mod because many creatures didn't fit the atmosphere of the original for me. It was due to some minor details that stood out. Not least because the creature icons were without a background. I added a "neutral" gray sky background to all of them. There were still two more noticeable problems: some textures with strong dithering and incorrect texture scaling (or excessive contrast). When I started going through all the textures, I found many issues: - Redundant duplicate images that weren't in texture format. - Unnecessary saving of semi-transparent channels where they aren't used, which doubles their size. - Empty transparent textures of enormous sizes that could be reduced to a minimum. - Lack of "mipmapping," which caused severe dithering when moving. (I don't know how it looks on 4K monitors, but on my FullHD monitor, it was very distracting.) - Unnecessary saving of "mipmapping" on transparent textures. - "Uncompressed" textures that are practically indistinguishable in quality if compressed. I thought I would do this relatively quickly, but I ended up getting incredibly bogged down, spending too much time on it, which I hadn't anticipated. Because I had to repeatedly adjust the results, and often got stuck on things that few people would ever pay attention to. Then I abandoned it for a while, occasionally returning to unfinished files. But since all these piles of duplicates cluttered my disk, I decided to finally sit down and resolve this issue once and for all. I did everything for myself; I didn't plan to release it, so I edited it to my taste. There were some controversial decisions. Sometimes (rarely) I reduced the main textures because I hardly noticed any difference in quality, but this significantly reduced their size. (Saving memory. By the way, five years ago, I wrote here that this mod crashes and only works on EWA. It turned out that the original .exe file wasn't patched to increase memory). Some large creature textures were actually scaled up (but there aren't many of them). (The monsters ended up being slightly darkened; I would add a bit more whiteness back, but I don't want to deal with it anymore). I changed the color tone to my liking (Rarely. For example, pink bugs were made into a more "natural" magenta). I am not satisfied with all the results; it can still be refined... But even as they are, they are definitely better than before. The deer had its legs lightened to remove the dark spots under its eyes. I tried to add texture to the horns and darken them slightly. Well… I combined all the creatures into one .pak file, which also allowed me to eliminate many identical duplicates. And I combined all the textures into another file and the icons into a third. Thus, 3 files: 1) All NCF creatures without textures (their files) 2) All their textures 3) Icons If you just need to add creature icons with backgrounds, you can simply put "NCF_creatures_FIX_ICO.h5u" in UserMODs. To add updated textures on top of the old ones, put "NCF_creatures_FIX_+_Texture" in Data. And to maximize space savings, without unnecessary files and duplicates, use all three files ("NCF_creatures_FIX_-_Texture" in Data) instead of the original files (starting with NCF_number of the creature). The total size was reduced from 940 MB to 545 MB.

Screenshots

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https://disk.yandex.ru/d/4XUwn_3WpD4Cvw

Great job!

Excellent models indeed!