Hacker News Reader

Comment by glouwbug | Hacker News Reader

I highly admire projects like this. Something even as simple as a core engine rewrite is a spiritual undertaking. I do not recall if Heroes 3 was multiplayer or not, but making the game multiplayer over TCP required the engine to limit itself to the use of integers since a single floating point would butterfly effect its way into destabilizing the lockstep system used in peer to peer networking. AMD / INTEL / POWERPC systems of the day (and even today) have millions of flags to configure the FPU at compile time.

As a shameless plug, and if anyone's interested, I'm doing something similar with Age of Empires 2: https://github.com/glouw/openempires

View on HN

The game does have multiplayer capabilities even over the Internet.

What's more, it still has some active players, among which I would highlight MeKick (TheKnownWorld) that regularly streams on twitch [1]. Anyway, the challenges he does vs computers (where he heavily handicaps himself in different ways) are more entertaining to me [2].

[1] https://www.twitch.tv/theknownworld/videos

[2] https://www.youtube.com/user/TheKnownWorld/featured

Heroes 3 did have multiplayer via LAN, and IIRC it had online multiplayer as well. It worked pretty well for the time; the fact that the game is turn-based probably helped in that regard.

And it has hotseat - players taking turn at one computer, that was the mode me and friends always played.

I think the number one after-school activity for me and my friends was at some point HOMM 3 (and 2).

I still fantasize that there will be an 'Empire Earth 3" - or an Empire Earth 2.1 (V2 re-released and updated for android / ps4 ) -

and or an open sourcing of a clone so that we could crowd source an EE 4 ...

I enjoyed age of empires but always liked empire earth 1 and 2 better.. never could pinpoint why exactly.

maybe a subconscious connection to some of the populace' gameplay mechanics on the Amiga - dunno.

maybe it's time for me to look at one of the EE clone things and try to make it like EE. I'ts been a long while, does AoE have magic priests that can convert enemy followers or similar? or is it just attack / kill ?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com