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Mod · 0.5.3-beta

Lords of Magic HD

Sharper portraits, items, buildings, screens and sprites, drawn over the originals as the game shows them — plus optional HD terrain at 2x, while the game keeps its 640x480 layout.

Download

Download lomhd-portraits-0.5.3-beta.zip (352 KB)GitHub release v0.5.3-beta

The GitHub release page carries the same zip. SHA-256:

6d4f784dc2ff8f1ef598ae25028d0ceb99290f1522a374f8916d9c375a0d812b

What it does

A replacement ddraw.dll — a fork of cnc-ddraw, a DirectDraw replacement that setup installs if your copy does not already have one — recognises each picture as it is drawn and paints a 2x-resolution version over it. Portraits, items and artifacts, buildings, screens and the sprites on the map all come out sharper. They are sharper, not bigger: each one fills the same space on screen as before.

Optionally, HD terrain draws the map at 2x as well. The game keeps its 640x480 layout; the terrain shows its extra detail in a larger window.

No game files are included

The download holds only code, the DLL, and documentation. Setup reads the pictures from your own copy of the game and upscales them on your machine with Real-ESRGAN, on your GPU. Each picture uses an upscaler that was picked for it by hand; those choices ship as a list, not as art.

What you need

  • Lords of Magic: Special Edition (Steam or GOG), vanilla or with the GS5R3 patch.
  • Python 3.9 or newer.
  • ImageMagick 7.
  • A graphics card with Vulkan.

Every install fixes a bug in the original lomse.exe that can freeze the game when a Death Shade or Frozen Shade dies (a one-byte fix, found by Skarn). HD terrain patches it further. Both accept only the GS5R3 build (the Steam version); any other executable is left untouched. The original is kept, and the full requirements, including disk space and run time, are in the README inside the zip.

Install

  1. Close the game, then unzip the download anywhere.
  2. Open a terminal in that folder and run python lomhd_setup.py. Add --terrain for HD terrain and --sprites for animated sprites.
  3. Start the game as usual.

Sprites that do not move (trees, buildings, lairs) are built on every install. Animated sprites (units, armies, flags, effects) are opt-in: --sprites upscales about 27,600 frames, which takes a couple of hours on a fast GPU and adds about 1 GB. It resumes if stopped, and later runs remember the choice.

To undo everything, run python lomhd_setup.py --uninstall.

Recommended window: 1280x960. The terrain is drawn at twice 640x480, so it shows its detail at that size or larger. Setup does not change your settings; set width=1280 and height=960 in the [ddraw] section of ddraw.ini in the game folder.

Beta status

This is a beta. The art overlay, sprites and HD terrain have all been played on Windows 11 and macOS. The changes in 0.5.3-beta have so far been tested on macOS only, so reports are welcome, and --uninstall puts every file back.

If anything looks wrong, open an issue on GitHub and attach the zip that python lomhd_setup.py --report writes. It gathers lomhd.log, your settings and any crash or hang report, with your user name scrubbed out, and says whether you used --terrain or --sprites.

Source and licences

The mod is MIT-licensed; Lords of Magic belongs to its rights holders.