Heroes of Might and Magic 3 Tomes Alpha Mod Development for CW

[MattCaspermeyer]

Well, I'm disappointed to say that it looks like my mod was too ambitious for the AP / CW game engine to handle.

I have 180 Tomes with 5 levels each for 900 new items. This is almost 125,000 lines of h3_tomes.txt. This is simply too big of a file for the game engine to handle and the EXE bombs when it tries to read the file (when including it from ITEMS.TXT).

If I delete tomes from the file until I get about 27,500 lines then it is able to read that in okay. Unfortunately, this is slightly more than 1/5 of the tomes.

So I'm a bit bummed with not being able to implement this feature of the mod as I saw it since I think it would have really been a lot of fun. I'm not sure what I'm going to do with this aspect of the mod so I'm just going to move on to implementing the other aspects from my H3B mod.

I guess the easiest thing to do with the tomes would be to take the 180 tomes and simply implement 1/5 of them (for 36 total tomes with 5 levels each). If I did this you'd probably only get about 5 tomes a game for replayability. I don't really like this, though, since it would mean leaving out 4/5 of the variability. I could also just implement the 180 tomes at level 5 already since I tried just the level 5 tomes and they read in okay as well. But then you don't get to fight the tome heroes to level them up so this isn't perfect, either. What would really be neat is if I could pre-generate the items you'd get out of the 180 (about 20 or so) at game start and then that would be well within the constraints above. Unfortunately, I don't know how to do this.

Does anyone have any ideas?

I'll also continue to check if I have any errors in my h3_tomes.txt file as maybe it's bombing on something that is not specified properly. Or perhaps if I slice it into smaller files maybe it'll take it?

In the meantime I'll just work on the rest of the mod while I think about this some more...

I've put so much work into this part of the mod, I'm really bummed - sigh...

Matt

/C\/C\