Revision as of 19:30, 25 February 2013

VCMI requires data from original Heroes 3: Shadow of Death or Complete editions and from the WoG expansion pack. Data from native Linux version made by LOKI will not work.

Binaries installation

Ubuntu

VCMI can be installed using PPA located here:

https://launchpad.net/~saven-ivan/+archive/vcmi

To use it type in Terminal:

sudo apt-add-repository ppa:saven-ivan/vcmi
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install vcmi

Debian

Download and install package for your distribution. Install can be done using any GUI managers or using command line:

sudo dpkg -i downloaded_package.deb
sudo apt-get -f install

Note: First command most probably will result in errors - this is normal behavior, all of them should be fixed by second one.

RPM-based distributions

Download and install package for your distribution. There are two ways to install package along with all dependencies:

Option A) Double-click the package. A package management window should appear with instructions to guide you through the process.

Option B) Open a terminal window, and type

sudo rpm -i package_location_and_name(e.g. vcmi-0.89-1.fc16.x86_64.rpm)

Other distributions

• Gentoo https://github.com/qdii/qdiilay/tree/master/games-strategy/vcmi
• Archlinux https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/vcmi-svn/

Compiling from source

• Packaged source
• Readme (available as README.linux in source package)

Installing Heroes III data files

To install VCMI you will need:

• Heroes III: Shadow of Death or Complete edition
• Unnoficial WoG addon: http://download.vcmi.eu/WoG/wog.zip
• VCMI data files: http://download.vcmi.eu/core.zip

Automated install

To install Heroes 3 data using automated script you need any of:

• One or two CD's or CD images
• gog.com installer
• Directory with installed game

Create temporary directory that will be used by script and go into it:

mkdir temp
cd temp

Run the script using options appropriate to your input files:

vcmibuilder --cd1 /path/to/iso/or/cd --cd2 /path/to/second/cd --download
vcmibuilder --gog /path/to/gog.com/installer --download
vcmibuilder --data /path/to/h3/data --download

You should use only one of these commands.

(Note: remaining part is only needed for vcmi 0.91)

Launch vcmiclient to determine data directory (output may differ)

$vcmiclient -v
Starting... 
VCMI 0.91
  data directory:    /usr/share/vcmi
  library directory: /usr/lib/vcmi
  binary directory:  /usr/bin/vcmi

Copy resulting files into your vcmi data directory:

cp -RTu vcmi /path/to/vcmi/data/directory

Offline install

Normally vcmibuilder script will autodownload WoG and VCMI data packages. For offline install you need to download this packages manually and replace download switch with this:

vcmibuilder <h3 data commands> --wog /path/to/wog/archive --vcmi /path/to/vcmi/package

Where h3 data commands stands for described earlier option(s) needed to install H3 data (path to data, Install CD or gog.com installer)

Fedora music support

To have Music support on Fedora it is required to perform a additional step. Fedora doesn't provide Mp3 playback support natively due to patents applied on the Mp3 technique. The SDL_mixer package from the official Fedora repo is compiled without Mp3 support. Luckily this isn't a huge problem due to the filesystem API of VCMI. If you place ogg files in the Mp3 folder it'll use those files. So all you have to do is to convert the original Mp3 to OGG by yourself. Then copy them to the /Mp3 folder and remove the old .mp3 files with e.g. rm -rf *.mp3. You may use those tools for converting MP3 to OGG e.g.: Dirogg Bash Script http://freecode.com/projects/dirogg or the graphical program SoundConverter(sudo yum install soundconverter).

Manual install

• Install Heroes III
• Extract WoG addon http://download.vcmi.eu/WoG/wog.zip
• Extract VCMI data files: http://download.vcmi.eu/core.zip

Launch vcmiclient to determine data directory (output may differ)

$vcmiclient -v
Starting... 
VCMI 0.91
  data directory:    /usr/share/vcmi
  library directory: /usr/lib/vcmi
  binary directory:  /usr/games

Copy your data to data directory. This should result in directory structure similar to this:

/usr/share/vcmi/config/
/usr/share/vcmi/Data/
/usr/share/vcmi/Maps/
/usr/share/vcmi/Mods/WoG/
/usr/share/vcmi/Mods/vcmi/
/usr/share/vcmi/Mp3/

Launching game

To start the game type in console:

vcmiclient

VCMI should be also available via desktop environment menu or launcher (Games/Strategy/VCMI)

Reporting bugs

Report any issues with packages on our bugtracker or post a message on VCMI forums In report please post:

• used distributive, version and architecture (for example "Ubuntu 11.10 32 bit"). For distributives that use rolling releases please post versions of all used libraries (boost, ffmpeg, SDL)
• console log as well as log files from ~/.vcmi
• steps to reproduce bug