Revision as of 18:56, 1 June 2012

VCMI requires data from original Heroes 3: Shadow of Death or Complete editions. Data from native Linux version made by LOKI will not work. All links are for VCMI 0.89

Binaries installation

Debian-based distibutives

Download and install package for your distributive. To install package along with all dependencies:

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 apt-get

Packages

Other Debian-based distibutives

VCMI requires g++-4.5 and boost-1.46 which are unavailable on Debian Squeeze and Ubuntu 11.04 or lower. If you'll manage to install them you can compile VCMI from source code.

Another (and probably more safe) option is to create chroot enviroment (how-to). This will allow to install package from another distributive.

Other Linux distibutives

Currently VCMI supports generation of .deb packages only. Patches to add support of any other package formats are welcomed.

Compiling from source

For compiling from source see README.linux file. You can get packaged source for current version here

Preparing data

The main idea of this step is to prepare all the data (sprites, sound files, maps, etc.) that VCMI needs to run and to put them into VCMI's "data directory" which is where VCMI expects to find them. The VCMI data package provides some of these data files. The rest come from the original H3 game and from the WoG expansion pack. All 3 need to be merged and placed into VCMI's data directory and this step explains how to do this.

Install original game and WoG addon. This can be done via Wine or from Windows.

Extract VCMI data package into the H3+WoG installation directory. If you used Wine and accepted the installer defaults this should be:

~/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/3DO/Heroes3/

After you have done the above you should have all 3 sources of data properly merged and ready to be copied into VCMI's data directory.

Launch vcmiclient to determine data directory:

vcmiclient -v

The above command will display something similar to this:

Starting... 
VCMI 0.89
  data directory:    /usr/share/vcmi
  library directory: /usr/lib/vcmi
  binary directory:  /usr/bin/vcmi
    ...

Copy installed game to the "data directory". This should give you directory structure similar to this:

/usr/share/vcmi/config/
/usr/share/vcmi/Data/
/usr/share/vcmi/Maps/
/usr/share/vcmi/Mp3/
/usr/share/vcmi/Sprites/

Note: Depending on whether you are installing one of the binary packages or compiling from source and how you configured the data directory prefix (--datadir) of your source package it may be e.g. /usr/local/share/vcmi or /opt/games/vcmi or something else. In any case it must end in "vcmi" and contain the sub-directories listed above.

Note: In some Heroes 3 editions these directories may have different case (e.g. MP3 vs Mp3). In this case you'll have to rename them to match required directory structure.

If you also have original Linux version of Heroes 3 by LOKI, you can also install the videos:

cp -a /PATH_TO_CDROM/data/video /usr/share/vcmi/Data

Launching game

To start the game type in console:

vcmiclient

Starting from 0.89 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