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Modding Age of Empires II with a Sprite-Diffuser

engine.study

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Re: Modding Age of Empires II with a Sprite-Diffuser

#14
post #10

This is a game that came out in 1999! More than 20 years later there have been two remakes, there's still a huge and healthy community and a thriving pro scene. And now someone is using relatively cutting edge image AI to mod the sprites. It's crazy to me how some of these old games have such staying power (Super Smash Bros Melee is another that comes to mind).

Tetris on the NES still has massive tournaments. It’s pretty interesting to watch these super-young games (relative to chess, tennis, etc.) mature and develop as genuine fields of competition.

Re: Modding Age of Empires II with a Sprite-Diffuser

#15
post #10

This is a game that came out in 1999! More than 20 years later there have been two remakes, there's still a huge and healthy community and a thriving pro scene. And now someone is using relatively cutting edge image AI to mod the sprites. It's crazy to me how some of these old games have such staying power (Super Smash Bros Melee is another that comes to mind).

The even crazier thing is card or board games that are still alive and modernized. Some games are timeless.

Re: Modding Age of Empires II with a Sprite-Diffuser

#16
post #8

This is great, can't wait unti this is taken to the next level... (they touch on this at the end of the article) - An RTS without units or buildings by default. - The players enter prompts and creates any unit they can imagine.

I was wondering about how this could affect gameplay. Like disguising your buildings by looking like other buildings.. That example of all the buildings being made of books. How can I tell the difference between a barracks and an archery range.. or just a patch of empty grass? I used to play a text based MUD that had a high level spell that let you create illusion spells that just output text of your choosing onto other players screens. It was often used to just verbatim send the You Died, text and ruin peoples day for a moment.

Re: Modding Age of Empires II with a Sprite-Diffuser

#17

Wow that was a treat. The author makes everything seems so easy. I fired up AUTOMATIC1111 recently and making good AI generated art (or whatever you want to call it) is way harder than it seems.

It’s really not that hard to make good looking stuff with these AI image generators, you just need the right models. The reason you struggled is because the basic stable diffusion model creates really ugly stuff by default. Try using a model from civit.ai and you’ll get much better results… or for even easier results, just use midjourney where literally everything that comes out of it looks fantastic.

Re: Modding Age of Empires II with a Sprite-Diffuser

#19
I'd love to do that to create fighting games character sprites. Combined with Mugen, it would make for a very fun experience and the LLM could help on adding attacks and gameplay logic.

Where should I start to make this happen? Stable Diffusion without customization is really bad at creating character sprites.

Re: Modding Age of Empires II with a Sprite-Diffuser

#20
post #10

This is a game that came out in 1999! More than 20 years later there have been two remakes, there's still a huge and healthy community and a thriving pro scene. And now someone is using relatively cutting edge image AI to mod the sprites. It's crazy to me how some of these old games have such staying power (Super Smash Bros Melee is another that comes to mind).

The even crazier thing is card or board games that are still alive and modernized. Some games are timeless.

Many of the best board games are less than twenty years old. Cardboard based entertainment has made huge strides recently.

By and large, good boardgames are not so much timeless as 'fairly new' instead.

There have been a few good games earlier, but it's really instructive to have a look at the ranked list of boardgames at https://boardgamegeek.com/browse/boardgame and check the publication dates.

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