— It’s dangerous to go alone! Take this

HeroWO is a JavaScript re-implementation of Heroes of Might and Magic III.

This repository sets up a workspace for running HeroWO game client and generating databanks and maps.

https://github.com/HeroWO-js

https://herowo.game

First off, install git, PHP (7+) and any web server. On *nix, you'll have all the stuff easily available via apt/yum/pacman/whatever. On Windows, installing Git for Windows, TortoiseGit (optional) and XAMPP will get you everything needed. XAMPP can be installed with all optional components unchecked.

Do not use GitHub's code download function because the archive it generates lacks the required submodules.

Instead, open Command Prompt, cd into your web server's document root (typically /var/www on *nix, C:\xampp\htdocs on Windows) and type this:

git clone --recurse-submodules https://github.com/HeroWO-js/Workbench.git

Alternatively, if you have installed TortoiseGit: open Explorer, right-click on the web server's document root or on any folder inside it, call Git Clone..., paste https://github.com/HeroWO-js/Workbench.git into URL, tick Recursive, leave other settings at their defaults and click OK.

The above does an anonymous checkout. If you have an account on GitHub, use this URL:

[email protected]:HeroWO-js/Workbench.git

The Workbench folder will have a bunch of subfolders, most initially absent.

You must see the core subfolder (the game engine itself; https://github.com/HeroWO-js/Core) and it must be filled with files - if not then you didn't initialize submodules as explained above. Game over, try again!

You'll also see update.php - the script populating various subfolders and making it easier to update the data later with less typing in the terminal.

Another one, optimize-png.sh, reduces size of static images by converting them to WebP or by running oxipng. You'd typically execute it on your own game client hosting server.

Eventually, you'll get:

• subfolders with game animations, images and audio - totalling about 1 GiB, but you'll need about 7 more GiB during initial convertion
• temporary subfolders used during initialization - update.php will suggest removing them once done
• databanks subfolder - game data in HeroWO format, extracted from HoMM 3 files and possibly modded
• maps subfolder - maps in HeroWO format, usually converted from HoMM 3 maps (.h3m)
  • this will take 11+ GiB for all official maps but it'll come down by 90% if you enable file system compression (update.php will advise)
• several *.ahk scripts - help extracting DEF frames (can be deleted)

By convention, folders with data coming from HoMM 3 are named after the data's original file extension in upper-case, optionally followed by - and the converted extension (e.g. WAV-OGG).

Once you're all set, type this:

php path/to/update.php

On Windows, you may be able to just double-click update.php to run it. Or click the Shell button in XAMPP Control Panel and type the line above.

Follow the script's interactive instructions to finish configuring your local environment (or run update.php -h for options). It may take a while, be patient even if nothing seems to be happening on screen!

Instructions for manual convertion are found in update.php's source code, convertH3Data() function's comment.

The core subfolder isn't automatically kept up to date with the latest changes in the game engine. Type this:

git -C core pull

Alternatively, on Windows with TortoiseGit right-click on core, call Pull and click OK.

1. Clone this repository to a directory, say X
2. Download contents of the torrent file found in herowo.io/dl to X (so you get X/BMP/OBJECTS.TXT, etc.)
   • The torrent with intermediate data is useful only if you're planning to tinker with modifications
3. Run update.php
4. Pull core

List of maps and some other features require that an API server is running. Start it by typing this (close the terminal window to stop):

php core/api.php watchdog

Default Apache caching may get in the way of debugging. You can turn it off by adding the following lines to the configuration file (such as /etc/apache2/apache2.conf or C:\xampp\apache\conf\httpd.conf) and restarting Apache:

Header unset Last-Modified
Header unset Etag