A few ways to improve the scenario editor

Age of Empires II: DE II - Discussion
46

Some new additions, many courtesy of amuralshoq’s thread: The new scenario editor has many changes that broke old Maps from AOE 2 HD

Objects:

  • Placing a gate on top of Broken Bridge B Bottom will result in the gate opening if its an ally bridge. Not sure how far this extends to other bridge pieces.

Triggers:

  • Changing projectiles: If I take an Archer that has Projectile 363 and add 2 to this value it should take me to Projectile 365 that skirmishers use, I actually get a Town Center foundation being popped out…

  • Giving units or buildings the effect “Damage Object” with negative values. This should be just like AOE 2 HD, at the moment on AOE 2 DE this has no effect on the units, buildings. Tell me why is this needed? Some maps use this trick to give units or buildings a temporarily HP which means if you give for example a Villager a Damage object value of -100, the Villager will have 40 HP and (100 HP) that is temporarily, and if an enemy damage this Villager for 100 damage the max HP of the Villager will still be 40 HP so you can’t heal this villager up to 140 HP because this trick makes the unit have a temporary HP.

  • A new change that has been introduced in AOE 2 DE where you can’t give gaia objects like Trees HP, why do we need HP for Trees? So you can give villagers the ability to get more Wood from certain trees or gold or whatever.

  • Not new to DE, but why are units, buildings HP limited to only 32xxx HP? And what is even more annoying for map makers is that when units, buildings reach that point of HP they will just die as they explode from having too much HP.

  • Heal Object can heal units but it will make units unable to have armor, attack power, and range technologies like Fletching, Bodkin Arrow, Padded Archer Armor, scale mail amor Scale Mail Armor etc…

  • Object Visible: If the unit/building set as visible object, is still visible through fog of war, it will trigger the condition as well.

Backwards compatibility:

  • A lot of object IDs have been changed around: battering rams have been replaced with a new version, jungle trees now have way more rotations, and so on. It would be great if there was a “Legacy Import” tool, or just a pop-up window when opening an older file in the editor, so that all of these inconsistencies could be fixed automatically. E.g. if the tool/editor detects a battering ram with the old ID, it changes it to one with the new ID (same goes for when an old object is listed in the triggers and effects), if a tree is detected that has since been gives more rotations, it tracks the specific rotations and changes them to match with their new corresponding rotations. So if a Jungle Tree has rotation 3 in the original, and that same graphic is now rotation 7, the editor detects this and updates it accordingly, changing around IDs and rotations to keep the look and functionality of the older map intact.

Various:

  • To be able to unhide a unit in the editor, it requires a unique string ID for that object. Previously an internal name was sufficient. Why make it harder for designers to unhide useful editor objects?

  • The new civilizations are nice addition but, when you want to import an old Map to AOE 2 DE, you should have an option in the Lobby where you could remove the ability to pick any of the new Civilizations because there are some Maps that can have a Hero for each different civilizations, and when you pick a civilization that is not from the older AOE 2 versions, you will not have a hero spawned at all.

  • When I load an old Map from AOE 2 with .scx and try to save the map using “Save as”, the game will crash.

  • Sometimes when I delete Triggers in a fast sequence the game will crash (I am editing an old .scx map).

  • When importing and playing an older campaign file, the instructions screen was missing, as was the victory/defeat screens. The game went from the Custom Campaign selection straight to gameplay, and then on ending straight to the achievements screen. This occurred for a brand new custom DE campaign and scenario as well, although the scenario did properly give me a defeat screen.

Suggestions:

  • Can we have a way to set a players starting resources to infinite or random?

  • The new addition for the objective being always-on screen is nice but would be even better if we could give each Player a custom objective unlike everyone having the same exact objective, we could use this to teach people how to play a custom scenario for example.

  • A LOS blocker object and/or trigger effect.

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