Heroes of Might and Magic II is a turn-based tactical strategy game developed in 1996. The history of the title continues with the canonical ending of its predecessor, culminating in the victory of Lord Morglin Ironfist.
After a prosperous reign followed by his death, the throne is disputed between his two sons, Roland and Archibald. After Roland's exile, planned by his brother, Archibald proclaims himself the new king. Roland builds a resistance to end his empire and achieve power.
The game features two campaigns, one run by the opposition (which is canonical) and the other by royalty. The way the adventure progresses remains the same. The player must build a kingdom, continually improve it, obtain resources, train soldiers, and be prepared to stop an enemy attack. Likewise, the ultimate goal is still to find the opponent's castle and conquer it.
As part of the Free Heroes of Might and Magic II project, a group of enthusiasts tried to recreate the original game from scratch.
A rebirth, which still requires a lot of effort
This project existed for some time as an open source product, however, work on it was discontinued Many years ago and it was only a year ago that a team began to form completely new that continued to develop the project, making it a goal to bring it to its logical conclusion.
The developers point out that the team lacks the designers that the project you need to fix the flaws in the animation of the original graphics. Participation in expansion development brainstorming plans is also encouraged, to which developers will move after they successfully recreate the original game.
But even with that, a new version of Free Heroes of Might and Magic II 0.8.1 has been released, which offers the following changes compared to version 0.7:
About the new version
- The creature, hero and spell animation system has been reworked in battle.
- Se added support for cyclical animation of surfaces, objects on the map, and creatures.
- A completely new internal rendering engine has been developed, which solves many rendering problems, and also much faster than the old one.
- Were added missing animations for spells like Lightning, Armageddon, Death Wave and corrected many ancient spells
- Various performance optimizations and normal support for full screen mode and selectable resolutions.
- Added proper support for config file and settings
- Fixed a large number of logic issues in combat, on the map, AI, and path finding.
- Improved support for music and soundsas well as updated MIDI converter.
- Added video support.
- More than 250 bugs fixed compared to version 0.7 (or more than 50 compared to version 0.8).
The project code is written in C ++ and is distributed under the GPLv2 license. If you want to know more about the project or consult its source code. You can do it from the link below.
How to install Heroes of Might and Magic II on Ubuntu and derivatives?
For those who are interested in being able to install this game, must have at least a demo version of the game Heroes of Might and Magic II to be able to play it.
To do this, simply use one of the downloadable scripts offered to obtain the demo version of the original game.
So that for Linux an explicit installation of SDL is required and for this, just script / Linux according to the package of your operating system and execute the file
install_sdl_1.sh
o
install_sdl_2.sh
After the script has to be executed found in / script
demo_linux.sh
To be able to download the demo of the game that is needed for a minimum development.
Once this is done, just execute make in the root directory of the project. For compilation of SDL 2, you have to run the command
export WITH_SDL2="ON"
before compiling the project.