Modding Age of Empires II with a Sprite-Diffuser
engine.study
engine.study
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 the author so I wonder if there's a technical limitation here that wasn't mentioned.
I remember this every once in a while because Dan's replies are great.
"Hey could we do <thing> that would make <other thing> so much easier and solve <problem>?"
"Closed as wontfix."
Usually this pattern repeats a few times until all workarounds are gone as well.
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 success -
https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/13jllfh/qu...
I noticed that there are some gaps in some of the models, specifically around the future and roman ones.
> 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.
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).
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.
Yet, even with all the caveats, it's still remarkable how much better boardgames have gotten.
This seems a bit of a high bar to make only one review site have to clear.
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.
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.
Recommender algos are cool and useful.
Stripped of its cultural significance, chess isn't that great either for a general audience. It suffers from analysis paralysis. I would only recommend it to a niche audience.
I love Diplomacy; I played many games over email, in person and even participated in the German Diplomacy championship (face-to-face) back in the 2000s. Yet, it's also a very niche game, and I can see why some people would rate it low. I actually prefer the game over email, because it gives you more time to think, sending emails resembles the telegraphs of the early 20th century and I am less likely to burn out from a months long game with one move every few days than one very intense day of face-to-face play.
Btw, if you like Diplomacy, I recommend playing on the 1900 map variant. It's basically an improved version of the standard map.
See http://uk.diplom.org/pouch/Online/variants/1900-GG.pdf
Or for further reading https://diplomacygames.com/baron-von-powell-creator-of-1900/ or http://uk.diplom.org/pouch/Zine/F2007M/Roburn/1900.htm
I've actually only ever played Diplomacy over Backstabbr.com with friends, so analogous to email/postal play (if you still count that as a board game). Completed several games now, and I've been wanting to do it in-person. That 1900 variant has more detailed notes than any other variant I've seen, and I'd like to give it a try!
Catan can be fun, especially the first few dozen times you play it. But it wears thin even for a casual group. We have better casual games these days. And even back then, we did: I found that eg Bohnanza released about the same time as Catan holds up much better to repeated plays; even though it looks much less impressive at first. The big problem with Catan is that the initial settlement placement determines so much of the rest of the game, and there aren't that many meaningful decisions left in the rest of the game.
I did most of my in-person games of Diplomacy when I was working in Cambridge, Cambridgeshire. I was working for a startup spun off from the local university, and noticed that the university societies were actually (mostly) open to the general public. So I just joined the Diplomacy society.
After a grueling day playing Diplomacy, I usually had second thoughts. (But that wouldn't keep me from doing it again a few months later.) But I did learn that I prefer play-by-email after all. The games are higher quality, and you can actually finish them.
Just like Risk can be an entertaining game, but it's far from the most entertaining game you could play during that time.
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 RTS genre itself is still very much dead, seeing no new games worthy of note to this day.
It's really a shame to me that the most popular multiplayer games these days seem to be FPS games, or games where you just control a single character. Don't get me wrong those games can still be fun, but they entail a fraction of the strategy as RTS games.
I hope one day we'll see a resurgence of the RTS genre.
I think Stormgate[0] will be interesting here, when it comes out.
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 still popular.
But C&C were fun to play through, and felt accessible to scrubs like me. (To be fair to Blizzard, StarCraft 2 is the ONLY Blizzard RTS I ever completed - or at least the episodes I bought ; they did exceptionally well on the difficulty scaling for that game.)
Competitive multiplayer was always meh for us, we loved comp stomps, and I somewhat am sad that the AI was so "bad" that you never really could get a good balance between "destroyed you instantly" and "easily overwhelmed".
https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2010/08/04/the-armageddon...
That version should run on modern machines.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Command_%26_Conquer_Remaster...
SC2 still has a fairly healthy playerbase, and even War3 and BW still have some players.
> Age of Empires II also died until it saw a resurrection in the pro scene in the early 2010s which has lasted to today.
You think AoE2 is alive but SC2 is dead? SC2 has very little support and will eventually be passed by AoE2 for playercount, but I don't think it's there yet. Pretty sure SC2 still has more players.
Stormgate, Tempest Rising and Sanctuary are ones that RTS fans are looking forward to. A lot of people also like Beyond All Reason (a recent TA-like fan game).
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 r/realtimestrategy subreddit a lot, and basically every RTS that flops, well, there are very good reasons for that that you'll see people mention. It's not just "oh I'm cool with AoE/Starcraft and won't try anything else". There are some quite cool fan games, especially in the Total Annihilation-like space, but of course they don't have as much splash/marketing.
One of the core problems is probably devs streamlining away complexity, especially mechanical complexity or base building. Nearly every RTS dev for the last 15 years seems to beat on this drum of, "We're not gonna be Starcraft! We're gonna be easier for casual players!" and then they fail miserably and you look at the top 3 RTSes: Starcraft 2, Age of Empires 2, Starcraft 1. It's almost like mechanical complexity and base building can be good things!
I think Starcraft 2 had the right of it with the endless co-op mode introduced in the second expansion, that thing was very popular with more casual players (it was the most popular mode in the game at least for a while). While it retained the same core feel and mechanics of the 'regular' game, they had a lot of variety with the different commanders (basically subfactions) that could appeal to different players, including ones that were easier/had less base building. But you could still have a fairly traditional commander if you wanted one, so it was the best of both worlds.
And it's easy to see how the mode could be expanded on too: more army customizability, more variety in missions (instead of nearly every mission being 2 bases, you could vary that number up), unlockables/items/rewards from missions, varying numbers of players on a team instead of exactly 2, raid missions, mini-campaigns or storylines, etc.
Frost Giant is also planning to make 3v3 an actual competitive mode in terms of balance and design for Stormgate, which is...rare. I can't think of a competitive RTS off hand that was balanced around teams rather than 1v1, or in addition to 1v1. That might help too, team games are more social and often more popular.
I can easily imagine a set of 'tiers' of challenges, where the bottom tier is super easy stuff for beginners and then each tier up increases the challenge until you're fighting a bunch of hard-level AI's simultaneously or whatever. Or maybe a Mario Bros-style world map that has various different challenges in different directions.
Brood War was famous for 7v1 comp stomps being very popular in custom games, and it was obviously huge competitively, it's the super hardcore competitive RTS, even if it wasn't really planned that way.
The PvE comp stomp crowd seems to really like the co-op mode in Starcraft 2 that was introduced. To the extent that they have complaints, it's mostly that they wish there was even more stuff in it.
I think for the most part, the things that competitive players and casual players want aren't really at odds. They're usually orthogonal desires.
But what does exist, are a lot of people who say "I want to play RTS, but" and will never be satisfied. Like, there's always tons of people saying that they just want an easier to play RTS than Starcraft, and there's been tons of those, and hardly anyone plays them.
Not only that. Playing a game today is going to a store, get a download code, wait half of hour for the game to install, make an online accout, confirm it, wait another half of hour for the game to update, start the game, shows you unskippable movies, then it starts some role playing and then finally the RTS or FPS starts. Sometimes you need a permanent connection to internet which makes the experience even worse.
With old games it is just: install the game then play.
But if you search a bit in the RTS section, there are definitely some gems on Steam (e.g. Northgard comes to mind, and currently I'm having a lot of fun with Timberborn, although that's a city builder, not a competitive RTS). Oh, and WARNO, even if it still has a lot of early-access roughness.
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.
This isn't true. Hera & Lierey are two of the best AoE2 players and are both young.
There's an S-Tier tournament happening this week for anyone interested: https://liquipedia.net/ageofempires/King_of_the_Desert/5
TheViper regularly streams his matches. Surreal watching them cause I remember playing against him (and losing) 20+ years ago.
I ascribe part of my deep love for history to this game.
I loved AoE 2 when it came out too. And yeah I loved the history immersion
Units would be hard because there's a sprite for each direction which you'll have to keep consistent, but it would be great to see if it's possible to do, maybe as a sprite sheet
Further reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genie_Engine#Games_using_the_G...
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 McQuarrie, who notably did the concept art for Star Wars.
A very, very old exe version called "ptribe" still has some STRATOS function names, and a cmdline argument seeminly specifying which game is being started.
If you like star wars and aoe2, I'd recommend it. Goes on sale for like 2 bucks on gog
It did nothing but replace the graphics, but it blew my mind.
(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.
edit - worked with zMUD anyways
It's surprisingly hard to make it look good when that is done, art direction is hard.
Also, I think the buildings would look better if you give it some context of the ground surrounding the buildings.
This certainly solves a lot of issues for tile-based games where you have to handle at least 3 cases in both graphics + programming (in a 2d, single-layer tile game, you need corner pieces, middle pieces, and edge pieces). Think two houses built next to each other in AoE - now they could mesh and form a completely new style of row house, without any effort
This is a style transfer via SD, Controlnet and EbSynth.
It reminds me of skins in a game like Overwatch – it's the shape that's the most important to make you able to identify a hero in split second, even if it's wearing a skin you have never seen before.
I was too artistically challenged to ever really make my own pixel art buildings - the best I could achieve was drawing little six-pixel cars driving up the spiral roof and into the reactor of the alternate-art nuclear power plant. It would've been great to be able to give style prompts and have the software churn out appropriate sprites for each building type.
Maybe OP was inspired? Seems like a big coincidence otherwise. Just wish he would've credited me.
Happy to see other people experimenting with this also though. It will be great for indie game development.
There was a post on hacker news earlier about how people seem to have zero ethical quandaries around plagiarizing and using chat GPT to write their essays for exams...
Where should I start to make this happen? Stable Diffusion without customization is really bad at creating character sprites.
Great that someone did what I wanted to try and never tried it :)