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Modding Age of Empires II with a Sprite-Diffuser

engine.study

81–90 of 129 posts

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

#81

I get an Invalid Certificate error when trying to visit the link. The title seems enticing though.

Seems like it's a valid cert from GoDaddy, did you block them as a root auth or something?

Thanks. It was a misconfiguration of my company laptop's VPN.

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

#82
Really good post and great example of how someone can incorporate these tools into their work. Maybe there will be a new resurgence of proc gen games that finally manage to get past the same-ness problem with more diverse, interesting generated environments.

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

#83
It should not take too long for us to use something like this to reupscale low poly game footage from YouTube or old archives (like D2 / Diablo 2 remastered) and style transfer to enjoy it in the style we prefer.

Great that someone did what I wanted to try and never tried it :)

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

#84
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 staying power makes me feel kind of sad, because it represents a lack of vitality... they've cleared the local space, like some sort of planetoid, and newcomers have little chance.

It's not that newcomers have little chance, but more the symptom showing that there's little interest for competitive AoE2 play among newcomers. Like Starcraft Brood War, that still features Flash, Jaedong and Bisu.

You can compare it to Starcraft 2, whose scene remains quite attractive, and the top 4 European players (all of them being top 10 world) are just 25 23, 21 and 18 years old.

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

#85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a 13 year old open issue on the Firefox bug tracker that could address this by adding playback controls to animated GIFs[1]. I remember this every once in a while because Dan's replies are great. [1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=560084

Ah yes, classic bugzilla. "Hey could we do that would make so much easier and solve ?" "Closed as wontfix."

Ticket is open, so go ahead and implement to your desire.

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

#87
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

One problem I have with the rankings here is they seem really prone to grade inflation and band-wagoning. Even more-so when the game is expensive.

The BGG rankings are a particular viewpoint into a general take on board games; the way I look at it - anything high ranked is going to be "good" even if I don't particular like the play style, theme, or execution. Many are "good but not for me".

The problem with the rankings is that some very playable games are ranked low. It's a meme on BGG but CandyLand is famously shit on: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/5048/candy-land - but it's a perfectly acceptable "game" for very young children, and if you've ever dealt with said children you know that getting them to successfully complete a CandyLand session without going backwards on the track, randomly wandering off, taking multiple cards, etc is a serious feat.

It's not a great game but it's certainly still playable in the niche it occupies.

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

#88
post #77

I wonder what is the legal aspect of this. Whether it would be possible to use this to create alternative assets for a game which would be unencumbered by copyright, for instance for Quake 3 where code is open source but assets are proprietary.

I'm not sure about this method in particular, but there are groups who push on that, I know you can find Doom with all the copyrighted assets replaced.

It's surprisingly hard to make it look good when that is done, art direction is hard.

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

#89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The staying power makes me feel kind of sad, because it represents a lack of vitality... they've cleared the local space, like some sort of planetoid, and newcomers have little chance.

> they've cleared the local space, like some sort of planetoid, and newcomers have little chance. The newcomers to the RTS scene are largely badly made. Company of Heroes 3 has already dropped below Company of Heroes 2 playercount despite having come out just a few months ago. AoE4 also had plenty of problems (no ranked ladder at launch? it took 6 months), though it being Relic, that's not very surprising. I'm on the…

It's hard to make a good RTS that both satisfies the competitive players and the people who want to just do various forms of comp-stomp.

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

#90
post #49
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Real Time Strategy (RTS) genre more or less died in the mid 2000s with Age of Empires II, Warcraft 3, and Starcraft being the ones that left a mark. Since that time: Warcraft 3 died; Starcraft was supplanted by Starcraft 2 and both eventually died outside of the lucrative Korean pro scene. Age of Empires II also died until it saw a resurrection in the pro scene in the early 2010s which has lasted to today. The RT…

Why do people want constantly new games otherwise they think that something is dead? This is like saying basketball is dead because basketball people only play basketball and not something else.

Because in the time between Warcraft I (not the first RTS but let's take it) and Starcraft, each new game was amazing compared to the previous. People who grew up in that loved that; but we've kind of leveled off, you can't really make things as amazingly better than current iterations graphically as the difference between WarCraft 1 and even StarCraft.
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