[HN Gopher] Modding Age of Empires II with a Sprite-Diffuser
___________________________________________________________________
Modding Age of Empires II with a Sprite-Diffuser
Author : serverlessmom
Score : 385 points
Date : 2023-05-21 23:14 UTC (23 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.engine.study)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.engine.study)
| trojanalert wrote:
| Some games are timeless classics, and to use Stable Diffusion to
| do this is incredible. Looks absolutely stunning. And yes, can we
| please have the 2 sec lag removed so we can inspect and actually
| see what Generative AI was able to output
| b1n wrote:
| 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.
| imiric wrote:
| Same here. I'm looking forward when this is used in all games.
| They could ship with just a LLM, gameplay logic, and some base
| assets that could be used as source. Then let the player choose
| and generate assets in any style they want. This could be
| limited with some predefined parameters, or entirely free form.
| Exciting times ahead.
| totetsu wrote:
| 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.
| rootw0rm wrote:
| i used to do the same thing, but with simple say/tell/shout
| commands + terminal control codes to move cursor/overwrite
| text/etc. was lots of fun =)
|
| edit - worked with zMUD anyways
| chii wrote:
| it'd be interesting to make a game where the units aren't
| hardcoded either - and to play against someone, you'd have to
| "figure out" what their units did and what weakness it would
| have (i imagine it would work by a point system, where for
| example, if you put more into health, their attack would be
| weaker etc).
| totetsu wrote:
| SMAC let you do this. The components all had costs, and the
| reactor upgrades increased their power, and IIRC reduced
| the costs. So as you advanced you picked and chose what
| frames, reactors, components, armor you want. It let you do
| things like Colony pods with orbital insertion, or
| submarine probe teams. Very fun.
| aledalgrande wrote:
| This is absolutely epic! Love AoE and also the idea! Stable
| diffusion is such a creativity enabler. Hope we will see more of
| this! Carmageddon next?!
| neom wrote:
| Waiting for someone to get all generative AI'esq with Myst.
| That will be a fun day.
| triggerity wrote:
| 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 :)
| aww_dang wrote:
| I've been looking for something like this for 4 directional
| sprites with interchangeable equipment.
| kayson wrote:
| 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).
| biohax2015 wrote:
| 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.
| EamonnMR wrote:
| 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.
| littlestymaar wrote:
| 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.
| throwaway6734 wrote:
| >It's not that newcomers have little chance, but more the
| symptom showing that there's little interest for
| competitive AoE2 play among newcomers
|
| 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
| flohofwoe wrote:
| The games that survived for so long are simply that good (so
| it's basically survivorship bias). There are plenty of new
| indie RTS games on PC, the vitality is definitely there. But
| there's no longer big publisher money behind it like in the
| heydays and without big marketing campaigns those games are
| much less visible.
|
| 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.
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| > 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 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.
| bombcar wrote:
| 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.
| hermitdev wrote:
| AOE4 has been an interesting journey for someone that
| prefers the good ol fashioned comp-stomp. It wasn't long
| before I was easily taking on 4 of the hardest AI and
| easily stomping them on certain maps, like mountain pass.
| But, they've progressively made the AI into a much
| tougher opponent. It's actually challenging now, and I'm
| only back up to 2 hardest, 2 hard with AI teammates on
| the same map. Can't speak to pvp; I've not tried at all.
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| I don't think it is, really.
|
| 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.
| Dalewyn wrote:
| 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 RTS genre itself is still very much dead, seeing no new
| games worthy of note to this day.
| r0uv3n wrote:
| There is the free and open source Beyond All Reason (BAR)
| inspired by Total Annihilation, which is very polished and
| a lot of fun. It's got features I've not seen anywhere else
| yet (in terms of possibilities for commands and
| customisation) and also has a growing competitive scene.
| It's worth checking out
| JSavageOne wrote:
| Which is a damn shame because RTS games are my favorite
| genre, with Age of Empires 2 and Warcraft 3 being my
| favorite games of all time.
|
| 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.
| rasz wrote:
| 'Beyond All Reason' regularly ranks second place behind SC2
| on Twitch.
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| > Since that time: Warcraft 3 died; Starcraft was
| supplanted by Starcraft 2 and both eventually died outside
| of the lucrative Korean pro scene.
|
| 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.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| SC2 is certainly smaller than it was in its heyday, but I
| don't see it going away anytime soon. I think going f2p
| is largely what's keeping it alive. It's still a hard
| game to learn, but I think it's got a fairly well thought
| out on-ramp with custom maps, co-op and 4v4s as
| relatively "safe" modes and a series of logical steps for
| eventually getting comfortable with 1v1.
| LelouBil wrote:
| Northgard is pretty good and the devs are very active.
| erfgh wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| bombcar wrote:
| 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.
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| > The RTS genre itself is still very much dead, seeing no
| new games worthy of note to this day.
|
| 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).
| yenda wrote:
| I loved empire earth II as well
| robertlagrant wrote:
| > seeing no new games worthy of note to this day
|
| I think Stormgate[0] will be interesting here, when it
| comes out.
|
| [0] https://playstormgate.com
| hnlmorg wrote:
| 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 still popular.
| baremetal wrote:
| Capitalism 2 also, I played that extensively.
| hermitdev wrote:
| 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.
| dhfs wrote:
| 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/
| nerdix wrote:
| Both the first C&C game and Red Alert were remastered in
| 2020 as a part of the "Command & Conquer: Remastered
| Collection".
|
| That version should run on modern machines.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Command_%26_Conquer_Remas
| ter...
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| I feel Westwood's games were always more about the single
| player experience. The maps were pretty well designed as
| sort of puzzle boxes you needed to figure out. The
| amazing soundtracks and cheesy FMVs were also very good
| at building atmosphere. Multiplayer felt unbalanced in a
| not very fun way.
| bombcar wrote:
| Agreed, StarCraft and friends got a big multiplayer scene
| that I was never into; I'm not a good enough player.
|
| 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...
| hot_gril wrote:
| The even crazier thing is card or board games that are still
| alive and modernized. Some games are timeless.
| eru wrote:
| 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.
| stOneskull wrote:
| wow, i had no idea there were so many boardgames.. i looked
| to see where my old favorite Talisman was and it's ranked
| #1764! jeez..
| eru wrote:
| That's actually pretty high.
| fbdab103 wrote:
| 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.
| bombcar wrote:
| 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.
| hot_gril wrote:
| 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.
| bombcar wrote:
| 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.
| hot_gril wrote:
| I know how it is. Some board games are almost like
| strategy video games with the amount of detail and
| immersion. Usually those same board game groups play D&D
| or something as well, like my housemates back in college.
| I just never liked those. If I'm gonna play a serious
| game, it's something simple with depth in play style,
| like Diplomacy.
|
| Recommender algos are cool and useful.
| eru wrote:
| Yes. And they are also just aggregates of what people
| think. They aren't God given absolute quality judgements.
|
| Yet, even with all the caveats, it's still remarkable how
| much better boardgames have gotten.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| > They aren't God given absolute quality judgements.
|
| This seems a bit of a high bar to make only one review
| site have to clear.
| spaceman_2020 wrote:
| The crazy part is that some of the players who dominated the
| multiplayer scene in 2000 are still playing...and dominating.
|
| TheViper regularly streams his matches. Surreal watching them
| cause I remember playing against him (and losing) 20+ years
| ago.
| egeozcan wrote:
| Don't remember playing against Viper but DauT had nearly made
| me smash my keyboard in a team game because I was sure he was
| cheating hehehe (and I was a teenager with a giant ego).
| rowanG077 wrote:
| Wow! I looked him up and he was already a competitive player
| at 10 years old? That's pretty insane.
| spaceman_2020 wrote:
| I must've been around 12 myself. This game has been a part
| of my life since before puberty.
|
| I ascribe part of my deep love for history to this game.
| baremetal wrote:
| I played the original Age of Empires when I was really
| young, I liked it so much I built my first website ever
| on geocities about that game.
|
| I loved AoE 2 when it came out too. And yeah I loved the
| history immersion
| bombcar wrote:
| Heroes III has something similar, with major mods being
| developed along with entirely new "replacement" game engines.
| s0ulphire wrote:
| Love it! The older kids in the fam regularly revisit this game to
| recreate the lan battles of old, would love adding these to shake
| things up a bit :) post up a paypal donation link if you'd like
| some $$ for your efforts!
| instakill wrote:
| Just here to comment that AOE2 is probably the best game ever
| made.
| dcist wrote:
| I agree with this comment. I wish there was an effort to
| improve the performance and fundamental capabilities of AOE2
| specifically (bigger maps, more varied terrain, higher pop
| count, ability of the game engine to use multi-core processors,
| etc.). AOE2 really did almost everything right and it's a
| timeless classic.
| [deleted]
| omneity wrote:
| 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 the author so I wonder if there's a
| technical limitation here that wasn't mentioned.
| neilsonnnn wrote:
| 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 success -
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/13jllfh/qu...
| omneity wrote:
| 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.
| rkuykendall-com wrote:
| Unfortunately the website is not currently usable, it's on a
| fixed loop.
| [deleted]
| heavyset_go wrote:
| 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
| moffkalast wrote:
| Ah yes, classic bugzilla.
|
| "Hey could we do <thing> that would make <other thing> so
| much easier and solve <problem>?"
|
| "Closed as wontfix."
| tomstockmail wrote:
| Ticket is open, so go ahead and implement to your desire.
| moffkalast wrote:
| 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.
| contravariant wrote:
| 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.
| bombcar wrote:
| I have a stupid dirty trick for this (works in Safari) - click
| and start dragging the image, but don't let go. It's like you
| drag a particular "frame" out and can look at it.
| keyle wrote:
| 20 years on a mac and I'm still learning stuff, thank you!
| oblak wrote:
| Just FYI: that old trick is definitely not a mac or Safari
| thing
| iforgotpassword wrote:
| I think Opera was the first to do that.
| fbdab103 wrote:
| Am I imagining things or once-upon-a-time did Firefox give you
| the ability to advance GIFs frame by frame?
| rzzzt wrote:
| Pressing Esc did stop the animation, but I'm not sure you
| could step over it.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| I thought this was a feature for a while because image
| hosting sites like Imgur convert animated GIFs into videos
| because the compression is better, and you can adjust the
| playback. Some of them will even keep '.gif' in the URL
| despite serving you a video instead.
| causi wrote:
| This is particularly infuriating when you're trying to use
| google image search to find a gif to embed in an html frame
| that doesn't accept videos and all you get are gifs that
| turn out to be videos.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| Yup, and the titular GIPHY doesn't even embed GIFs.
| qup wrote:
| In the past you could freeze them and step through frames by
| right-clicking the image, but I can't remember which browser
| it was in. It was over a decade ago iirc.
| haolez wrote:
| 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.
| syntaxing wrote:
| 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.
| MattRix wrote:
| 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.
| syntaxing wrote:
| Is there anything that runs local? Any particular model you
| like?
| GaggiX wrote:
| MattRix linked civitai, every model there can be run
| locally, you just need to choose the one you prefer.
| Imnimo wrote:
| I remember back in the early 90s there was an expansion for
| SimCity 2000 called the Urban Renewal Kit, which let you draw
| your own building sprites to replace the ones in the base game.
| It also came with a pre-made pack of futuristic buildings.
|
| 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.
| tekni5 wrote:
| Kind of tried something similar in the game called Rust:
| https://youtu.be/j674nbG4_t8
|
| This is a style transfer via SD, Controlnet and EbSynth.
| [deleted]
| pluijzer wrote:
| I get an Invalid Certificate error when trying to visit the link.
| The title seems enticing though.
| moffkalast wrote:
| Seems like it's a valid cert from GoDaddy, did you block them
| as a root auth or something?
| pluijzer wrote:
| Thanks. It was a misconfiguration of my company laptop's VPN.
| netsharc wrote:
| The images of ruins at the end are interesting. Imagine an option
| that after winning the game you can fast-forward time and watch
| your glorious civilization decay into ruins and nothingness.
| lachstar-x wrote:
| Or you play the same map again and have to start in a different
| spot, and you have the ruins of your last game on the map
| Hitton wrote:
| 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.
| bombcar wrote:
| 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.
| trh0awayman wrote:
| The first example looks pretty unique for an art style. I'd love
| to see this done on the fly, so that each building is unique
| during game play.
|
| 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
| dazhbog wrote:
| AoE space civilization with a dash of neon lights... Sign me up!
| butz wrote:
| Looking at that one with columns gives me an idea: how about M.C.
| Escher based buildings sprite pack?
| xwdv wrote:
| I've thought of this not for AoE, but for Sim City 4. Currently
| midjourney can produce art for buildings that could almost be
| used directly in game, but stuff like shading and lighting needs
| to be tweaked.
| drekipus wrote:
| That is sick, I'd love to play some wackier AOE environments, or
| do "space station vs jumping castle" battles.
|
| 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
| bombcar wrote:
| Reminds me of the SimCity texture pack which made it look like
| outer space (or maybe it was SC2000).
|
| It did nothing but replace the graphics, but it blew my mind.
| Dalewyn wrote:
| 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...
| 9dev wrote:
| 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!
| hn92726819 wrote:
| 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
| arrow7000 wrote:
| aoe2 takes place in the middle ages so indeed has no
| aircraft
| alternatetwo wrote:
| 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 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.
| alternatetwo wrote:
| I am just blind. They were linked in that post all along: h
| ttp://aoe.heavengames.com/aoegallery/?occur=1&lang=en&cover
| ...
| dave_sullivan wrote:
| 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.
| yreg wrote:
| Using ControlNet with a depth map is very useful here, since it
| makes the modded building similar to the original exactly in the
| way the users identify it.
|
| 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.
| lvl102 wrote:
| Do Simcity 4 next. Heck you can train it on actual buildings off
| of Google Maps or others like it.
| Simon321 wrote:
| I actually did this before the 7th of may:
| https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/13axnoa/tr...
|
| 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.
| j7ake wrote:
| A novel twist to a timeless classic! Bravo
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2023-05-22 23:02 UTC)