Custom Hero Editor (Idea?)

[Chasolk]

Good Morning/Day/Evening to you.
Like others that often browse these forums, i'm but another lonesome player looking for a modder's insight/talent into an idea of mine; In the hopes that it might lead to a mod being created with the advertized feature posted about in here. While i know chances might be slim, one might as well try & hope for the best, eyy?

Heroes of Might & Magic 3 comes with it's own custom map & campaign editor; both of which are quite excellent if i might say so. Alas, when it comes to making your own heroes you're left out of luck. Sure, you can rename an already existing hero in the map editor & import your own portraits of them, but not anything close to your own hero with it's own unique portrait/ability that you can play with in other scenarios.

Would it be possible to create a tool that would let us create & use custom heroes in HOMM III?
One that comes with custom portraits, unique feature that's aligned with an existing faction. Nothing extreme like creating an overpowered character but just letting one choose to create their own special hero beyond those whom already exist into the game in whichever scenario one might want to play.
(And if not a tool to do the work for us, what steps would one have to take to create their own custom heroes?)

I hope a modder sees this forum post & looks into the matter. Your aid would be most appreciated!

[thestormdragon]

Sorry late answer to this, not to many H3 modders on the Nexus. There is one way actually to do this that I know of. If you have ever heard of the VCMI mod for H3 with it and any town mod made for it you can change some aspects of the hero in the hero configuration file for that hero. There are also portrait bmp files usually in the mod that are simple hero icon pictures too. They are easy to change with GIMP just keep the same size and format as the original and you are good to go. I recently did some changes to a hero for one of the VCMI town mods I downloaded, changing the bio and name of the hero in the configuration file for it. I think you can change other stats too like hero abilities too in this file. There is a learning curve here though. You need to understand something of VCMIs configuration files and their structure. They have a good wiki that helps with this. I also seem to recall that it is possible to adjust some of the hero's abilities for a random hero type or a generic hero type (castle, rampart, ect.) in the H3 editor, but its been awhile and I could be mixing this up with the H5 editor. One thing I do know for sure is any custom hero created has to be associated with a town either an existing one in H3 or a modded one. Doing one for existing H3 towns is much harder and requires a few H3 modding tools. I would recommend VCMI and changing a hero in one of the town mods instead, much easier. Also unlike existing H3 editor it is much easier to add to the VCMI map editor a new hero or customized existing one. You might be able to do some of this in ERA for Wake of the Gods (WOG) too, but I am not familiar with how to do this. Good luck.