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.
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.
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.
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.
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 -
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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).
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
> 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).
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.
> 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.
> The newcomers to the RTS scene are largely badly made.
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.
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.
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.
Having a semi-structured form of this would also be really good imo. Starcraft 2 sorta has this -- there's a UI section similar to ladder that pits you against increasingly harder AI's, but it's just a single track and doesn't go far enough imo.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Catan isn't actually all that great (and I say that as someone who bought his set back in 1995). We have much better games these days.
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.
Catan is merely ok from a serious gaming perspective, but for most people sitting around having fun, it's a go-to. There's value in it looking nice and being easy to understand, and I can see it staying popular 20 years from now. The top listed modern games have only ever come up in niche board game group settings for me, while even chess and Diplomacy have been much more popular. This is only my experience, but I'm probably not alone in thinking the top games are all very uncommon.
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!
I agree with your evaluation of the top listed games on BGG.
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.
That's very lucky of you. Diplomacy is my favorite game, and some of my friends like it too, but it can be hard to get 7 people committed to something that might last 2 months (or 4 hours if in-person). I'm sure I can find some club in California for this if I try, but I'm already in too many clubs.
In a 'frictionless vacuum', Diplomacy is one of my favourite games.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It is possible they came up with the concept completely independently, though I would agree it does seem rather unlikely. It would've been the classy move to give you a shout out if they were inspired by your project.
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...
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.
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 :)
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.
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!
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.
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.