The admin over at HOMM fan-site Elrath.com found a leaked beta of the HOMM5 Map Editor on a torrent site a few days ago, and has made the files available on his site. I downloaded it and it works if you merge the editor /bin folder into the main HOMM5 /bin folder.

Frankly, I’m not so sure how “leaked” this is. Elrath has had it on his site for a week, and has provided a link to the files from the official Ubi HOMM5 forums. Ubi has done nothing about either. They have also been consistently releasing betas of their products for testing and feedback. So have at it I say. But to maintain that feeling of being l33t hax0rz, I’ve provided a shaddy cell phone screen capture below. ZOMG!

The editor isn’t too cumbersome to use, but for most will take some getting used to before you can turn out anything good. It also allows you to modify existing maps as a teaching tool or template for your own. I only monkeyed around with it for a few minutes, but it seemed to give you control over everything from AI behaviour to which “days of the week” can pop-up. I expect some truly great player-made maps will begin appearing within the next few weeks.

In a reversal of its earlier position as reported on this blog, Freeverse is now saying that Cider is factoring into their plans for the port. Unless it is going to be too expensive to break the contract with the Russian port house, I would think this would be a great idea for them. It would not only make the “port” a lot cheaper and get it out the door within a matter of days or week, but will almost make it feasible to include extras like the Map Editor and support future expansions. Gamers win, Freeverse wins. The only question is how many G5 gamers (and hence sales) this will leave out in the cold with their noses pressed against the glass.

It would also be another first in the “new Mac gaming economy” by showing how established Mac programmers like Freeverse or Aspyr can act as the licensing and tech-support middle-man between the primary game producer, the Cider process, and the Mac gamers. Cider has stated that their interest is to work directly with the first-party publishers, but I don’t see how this works practically. Not only would the first-party have no tech support experience for the Mac version, but their relationship to established Mac distribution channels would also likely be weak.

All that speculation aside, here is something concrete in case you’ve missed it. The fans have risen to the challenge and have produced a comprehensive 50MB Missing Manual that covers everything there is to know about HOMM5. A great reference well produed and well worth printing out. In color!

CelestialHeavens.com links to a half-dozen mirror servers to ensure that you can get your grubby little hands on the new PC demo of HOMMV! The demo contains two maps from each of the Inferno and Haven campaigns, one additional single-player map, and the intriguing new duel mode with six heroes. It weighs in at about 700MB.

If any MacIntel gamers can get their hands on the demo, I’d love to hear your gameplay and performance impressions, particularly the requirements to run the game with all the eye candy turned on at higher resolutions. I am hoping to have a new MacIntel MacBook Pro by the time the game ships in May, and am currently wondering if I should settle with the cheaper 128MB ATi x1600 or splurge on the 256MB version.