The View Spell Bug Nobody Noticed | Rebuilding Heroes of Might & Magic [Episode 120]

In this episode of my Heroes of Might and Magic 1 engine rebuild, I fix the animated beacons that appear on the world map — the colored spheres shown by view spells like View Resources, View Mines, View Towns, View Artifacts, and View Heroes. I start by comparing my build against the original game running in DOSBox, where the spheres use a radial, concentric palette-cycling effect. My earlier AI-assisted attempt had it wrong: the animation cycled incorrectly, the orbs were the wrong size, off-center, and shifted too far up, and there was no player-colored flag attached to the hero sprite. This one is a live-coding session — I usually record after a feature is finished, but I thought I had it nailed and only caught the remaining issues on camera, so you get to watch the whole debugging process. Along the way I work through anchoring the sphere position to the bottom of the hero sprite, getting the palette cycling to match the original, sizing and centering the orbs correctly, and adding the correct player-color flag (using flag6.icn) across the various view spells. I also discover something I never knew after 30 years of playing: mines actually change color on the map to show which player controls them. These aren't popular spells and nobody had reported the visuals as a bug, but it was bothering me, so I sat down and fixed it. By the end the spheres animate correctly, sit in the right spot, and carry proper faction flags — a big improvement over where we started.