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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

#101

Post by arrow7000 »

hn92726819 wrote: post #80
9dev wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn’t know that! Just googled and was slightly disappointed - that looks just like AoE with the sprites swapped out, down to the same trees. Well. Still interesting to know this happened!

I've played this game and never played aoe2. As I understand it, aoe2 has no aircraft while swgb has classic star wars ships (x wing, y wing, tie fighter, etc). If you like star wars and aoe2, I'd recommend it. Goes on sale for like 2 bucks on gog

aoe2 takes place in the middle ages so indeed has no aircraft

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

#102

Post by alternatetwo »

alternatetwo wrote: post #32
Dalewyn wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funny you mention space stations, because the Genie engine that powers the Age of Empires line of games was also used for Star Wars: Galactic Battlegrounds. Further reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genie_Engine#Games_using_the_G...

And even more interesting, before Age of Empires was Age of Empires, but was called "Tribe", there used to be a space age version developed alongside called "Stratos". Here are some demo/concept screenshots: http://aoe.heavengames.com/cgi-bin/forums/display.cgi?action... I swear, there used to be more, but I keep misplacing them. Maybe they are in an album on there which I can't find. The concept art was by Ralph McQ…

I am just blind. They were linked in that post all along: http://aoe.heavengames.com/aoegallery/?occur=1&lang=en&cover...

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

#105

Post by bombcar »

hot_gril wrote: post #98
bombcar wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yeah, I've heard of very few of the top ones, and they look like the super complex kind of games I don't play. I did play Pandemic Legacy and didn't like it. Then I cmd+F'd for Diplomacy, Catan, and chess on the top list, didn't see them, and said nah.

The people who review board games are ... a special bunch. Those games are very popular and well ranked, but they're not considered "best of the best" by people who "seriously play games".

One of the best usages of BGG is to find a game you like, and use it to find games that are like that one, and see what you want.

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

#106

Post by omneity »

neilsonnnn wrote: post #96
omneity wrote: post #6

Big AoE fan here. The idea is brilliant and I love the execution. I wish the author did not put every screenshot in a gif, I'd have preferred to be able to look at the results in a less stressful way. 2 seconds to switch to another screenshot, that's way too fast! On a side note, it would be interesting to try to apply the same technique to units and effects (explosions, fire, etc). I didn't see a mention of it by th…

hey, author here, thanks for the note about the GIFs. If you go to the website ( https://engine.study/sprite-diffuser/ ) you can select the themes from a dropdown to see each one. Units are going to be difficult, villagers are something like 10 pixels across - getting them to pose correctly will be hard. However, there is someone doing something similar with the original Mortal Kombat sprites who is having a lot of s…

I must have missed the link to the website. The preview demo is pretty neat!

> Units are going to be difficult, villagers are something like 10 pixels across

Could it possibly help to upscale units, apply reskinning, and then downscale them back?

The Mortal Kombat WIP is super interesting, thank you for linking to it! I’m wondering which techniques are used to keep the rendering stable cross-frame.

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

#107

Post by GaggiX »

syntaxing wrote: post #78
MattRix wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Is there anything that runs local? Any particular model you like?

MattRix linked civitai, every model there can be run locally, you just need to choose the one you prefer.

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

#108

Post by moffkalast »

tomstockmail wrote: post #85
moffkalast wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I get that it's open source and all that, but sometimes one just feels like strolling down to Mozilla HQ and saying "What exactly would you say you do here?" Like people are being paid to work on this thing, they have $400M in revenue. But yeah I'm still mostly in the Chromium camp myself and couldn't care less.

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

#109

Post by dhfs »

hermitdev wrote: post #99
hnlmorg wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

C&C is another hugely popular one. Though I was in the minority of not enjoying Westwoods RTS so much. I much preferred Warcraft and StarCraft. But my favourite was The Settlers. This was also an era when business simulation games (you could argue as another “style” of RTS but not combat based) were popular too. Like Transport Tycoon, Theme Park, etc. From past conversations on here, it sounds like City Builders are…

I picked up a copy of C&C red alert a year ago. Sadly, it's unplayable on modern PCs. At least it was for me. Too many issues, crashes and the game speed not being changeable before game launch and by the time you can change it in game, it's too late and you're basically already way too behind to catch up. It's a shame because it was one of my favorites from the era.

There are open source engine reimplementations which use the original assets to play the c&c games on modern machines. See https://www.openra.net/

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

#110

Post by contravariant »

moffkalast wrote: post #70
heavyset_go wrote: post #62

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."

Could be worse, wouldn't be the first time some minor change or bugfix breaks some power user feature and instead of fixing it properly they just close it as wontfix.

Usually this pattern repeats a few times until all workarounds are gone as well.

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