Hero Quest PC: rule differences

[Kurgan]

Yes it has many changes, some of them are useful, but many don't translate as well to the physical board game it is based upon! This is a very easy version of the game, about the only thing it is missing is a mid-quest "save state" and reload feature.

[theruler76]

Sorry for necroposting.
I've recently working on the italian translation of this DOS game I used to play when I was a child. The official italian translation was beyond absurd and completely different from the boardgame (another game I used to play with my friends back in the days).
The game was also plagued by a bug that prevented the player to save the progresses of any character. Only now I found out that it was a bug of the italian version only. Upon fixing it I've decided to go deeper and use the project as pretext to learn some assembly. I've already had mild debugging experiece but hey, there is always room for improvement.
So, I came across this excellent and detailed topic by @kurgan and used it as reference to understand what can be done to improve the game. I am now at a point that almost every "complaints" of this topic have been solved.
What I am at now is the hard part: monster pathfinding and shooting. Help wanted!
Monsters are really dumb and the crossbow is insanely powerful (if you find the right spot and shoot perfectly diagonal, you can take down a monster at the other end of the map even across multiple undiscovered rooms).
I've reverse engineered pretty much all the code and understood most of the functions, memory locations and variables. Every things I've mapped are now on moddingwiki page.

A (mostly) comprehensive list of the bug fixed and features added so far:

- some Walls/doors/furniture/floor tiles were in the wrong position or missing in quests
- The spell "reveal a room" of the Genie now correctly works
- Now when you happen to click on a hidden pit trap the game doesn't "warn" you keeping the hero in place anymore, you walk towards it and eventually fall into it. Before it was "legal cheating".
- In the quest 4 "the gold of the prince Magnus" the message "you can carry only one" didn't appear and it was possible to take 4 chests
- Now wrongly cast a spell (ie on an out of sight monster or on an undiscovered point on the map) doesn't waste it anymore.
- In quest 6 even if the equipment has been subtracted, the heroes kept the stats
- When looking for traps, as soon as a secret passage is discovered, all the other traps were no longer revealed
- the special event ID 0x16 (trapped chest in quest17) didn't reveal the secret port if triggered first
- In mission 9 "race against time" the second chest cannot be taken anymore if you first searched for traps and THEN treasures. Added the message "you can carry only one".
- Defeating Bellthor didn't show any text although present in the language file.
- Aligned the graphics of hero heads icons with their in-game appearance
- Restored the protection screen for preservation (just enter whatever page number)
- The witch lord could have been killed by magic in quest24
- when casting "heal body" on a monster the text "the hero is back in force" appeaered and the monster couldn't be targeted anymore and froze
- Orthogonally shoot across a tile with an opened door or a undiscovered secret door, blocked the line of sight
- Fallen rocks didn't block the line of sight as it should
- Search random events weren't always random, groups with subsequent events had high incidence (first gold events, than potions, then bad things), now they are properly pseudo-random
- unequipping a weapon now doesn't auto-unequip Borin's armour anymore
- Changed the order of monster's target priority from barbarian-dwarf-elf-mage-ragnar to the opposite
- removed unnecessary confirmation (insert floppy) when loading/saving
- added a brief description of the weapons, potions and spells in-game and in the armory
- The mage has now restricted use of the equipment (staff, toolkit and special items only)
- Special events "you find a shield" and "you find a spear" didn't assign them to the mage
- The Armory is completely revamped. You can sell items at half price or give them to other heroes
- the potions are no longer lost between quests
- the "refresh" button now only reset body and mind points, leaving all other stats/equip intact.
- the healing potion no longer cancels all effects of other potions
- When suffering the last wound if you have an healing potion in the inventory or an healing spell is now automatically used to save you from death


Some fixes are language specific (italian) but I am going to port all the changes to english too.

If you want to help or betatest please feel free to do so!

[Kurgan]

It would be really cool to see what someone could do making a homebrew game that included all of the best features and options of the various editions (NES prototype, DOS and Amiga/Atari ST editions). If that's what you're planning I wish you the best!

[theruler76]

It would be really cool to see what someone could do making a homebrew game that included all of the best features and options of the various editions (NES prototype, DOS and Amiga/Atari ST editions). If that's what you're planning I wish you the best!

I've never played any other version rather than the DOS one. I am curious to know which are the best part of those games, if anyone would chime in.
My goal with the DOS version was to correctly implement all the rules of the boardgame and fix the original bugs (so many!).
at the link above there is a fully functional build that can be tested.

[Kurgan]

The Amiga/Atari ST versions have some extra sound effects not present in the DOS edition if I recall correctly.

The European (PAL) NES edition prototype adds some additional features (such as the bracers and cloak from 2nd edition, but also the Kellar's Keep quests... of course this is a completely downgraded engine graphics-wise).

This is a big deal, but maybe a new post devoted to your program should be next? Probably some text should be added indicating that it is a fan patch?

Which version of the board game rules are you seeking to imitate, the 1990 NA/remake rules?

Already it sounds like an improvement on what was released previously.

[theruler76]

We can modify the graphic and the code but adding bracers and cloak for example would be very difficult.
When modifying the assembly code the caveat is to do not mess with the surrounding codE; you have to change it to make this more efficient so to have room to fit your new code in. Or if you're lucky enough to find an "unused" spot in the exe to cram the code in (like I did for the sell-exchange routine).
Adding new sounds is beyond my skills, I think.

Probably some text should be added indicating that it is a fan patch?

I've added a line in the cedits.

Which version of the board game rules are you seeking to imitate, the 1990 NA/remake rules?

What I am trying to do is to take the best from the three worlds (US/EU/remake). It is anyway a balance between room and original code.
ie the genie(reveal) spell code was alrerady there, they simply disabled it because it was bugged and they probably had no time left to fix it for the release (I suspect it was the same for the many other bugs I've fixed).