Heroes of Might and Magic II AGG Reader and Extractor #1
Luke warm on the heels of my Doom Engine WAD Reader and Extractor program, I’ve dug out some of my really old Visual Basic 6 (VB6) code (and ported it over to C#) to allow for ICN reading, which is a Run Length Encoded (RLE) image format for storing multiple images native to the Might and Magic series, and I can note the following about my code: it’s unstable, it falls apart under pressure and all of a sudden, out of nowhere, it bails on you.
On the positive side, at least my debugger actually tells me what’s going on!
On another note, I can play the 82M sound files although for whatever reason, the sound card refuses to close after it’s finished and I don’t get this problem with anything else I’ve tried.
Dealing with the sound card is pretty new to me still, so it’s probably just a dumb-arse mistake on my part.
Nice GUI. I made myself an ICN to TGA tool long time ago, but lacked graphical interface, just command line. Have something similar for TIL and BIN files I think.
About .82m sound files, you just have to append a proper WAV (RIFF) header at the beggining of each file and then they’ll play fine even on windows media player. Check you are using the proper values for each setting (frequency, bitrate etc)
I like to see I’m no the only one which likes researching about this fantastic (great I mean) old game. Now I’m trying to make an H2 remake of mine (I already know about fheroes2 engine, but I want to do it myself)
Hi there, thanks for the info.
I’ve got most of the information on the file formats. I’ve just been woefully bad at updating my Heroes 2 page. I keep meaning to do it, and a thousand other things!
Since this application, I actually did start work on a unified reader for Heroes 1, 2 and 3, although it was never released, it did cover a fair few of the file formats from each game.
Hopefully I get chance to shape everything up over Christmas.
I’ve wanted to write my own Heroes 2 or 3 engine myself regardless of what already exists
Terry
I had already thought that you must have more work done, as (surprisingly) last time I visited your website was at least a year ago, when I was just starting to code similar tools. However, I had some issues to contact you (don’t remember what exactly) and then just settled the issue as I thought you were not going to update the site anymore. Fortunately you did, and I’ve found you’re site again when googling for some info about AGG format (didn’t have my researches here in the laptop haha)
Received your email, as I said I also have most formats documented, and a bunch of C/C++ written tools. However, I didn’t have the time to put all this together, task which I started recently to build some kind of “engine”. About the language used, I made my old GUI tools using C# which I’ve found very productivity boosting but too limiting in terms of portability. As you said Java is an interesting option, it would be easy to port the Homm2 engine to android phones. For now, I’ll code everything in plain C, that way the work can be included in most other languages.
If you are planning to continue working on this topic, I’d like to keep in contact with you. Do you use any IM protocol like gtalk, facebook etc? Anyway, I’m willing to share code and info and maybe we can do some neat thing.
Thanks for replying! Keep up the good work, and take care
I hadn’t thought about Android with regards to the Java engine. That’s a pretty interesting thought
I’ll send you an e-mail to the address you’ve posted with, with contact details to some IM clients I have.
Hope to speak to you soon