back in HD or pre HD, graphic tab in advanced genie editor (AGE3) had the ability to mirror graphic angles. With Definitive Edition however, this was removed due to how shadow works.
I propose to have this feature added back for modders and it’ll benefit us greatly. I wish the Devs to consider this due to the current download speed issue with mods. It has been mentioned several times before, the current issues of subscribing to mods:
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players in North America seems to have decent download speed (when downloading from the server). However players from Asia and/or Australia gets measly 50KB/s to 100KB/s, even with a 100mbps+ internet connection.
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currently mod server does not allow players/modders to download / upload only the difference in file, a minor update would mean re-download the entire thing. Adding the above, a 1GB mod would take players upwards 20+ minutes depending on where they’re located, which is simply not feasible online game lobbies.
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another issue is players cannot unsub while downloading, which makes everything even more difficult.
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lastly this makes it impossible for modders to support UHD, simply too many hurdle in place to play multiplayer with UHD as it’d easily 4x the size of mod in graphical content.
by allowing graphic angle mirroring, modders can separate shadows from the main custom units while reducing graphic size by up to ~40%, which is significant for big mods with lots of custom graphics and would help towards multiplayer gaming experience as well as allow more UHD content to be played.
@anon63664082 not sure who can make the decision/changes on this, if you do not mind passing it along.
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@IkoKnight8151 is the one who usually passes stuff along. Can you actually explain what this is though? Because I don’t really have any clue.
this doesn’t benefit for custom buildings, but would reduce mod size for custom units that has 8, 16 or 32 facing angles (more angles, bigger the reduction).
take a mod 1GB in size, would take those player ~2 hours to download at ~150KB/s speed. (again, not the internet speed of the player but rather the speed they would get allocated to them by the mod server).
take AOEDE elephant unit in UHD as an example. it has 32 facing angles and it’s shadows, say idle, death, walk, attack animation comes to around 80MB in size, this mean a player from Asia or Australia would need 9+ minutes just to download a single unit.
if mirroring is allowed, this 32 facing angle can be reduced to just 17. while this does not change shadow graphics as those should not be mirrored, shadow graphics size are much smaller than actual unit. removing 15/32 angles would mean a reduction of ~47% in size, so those files at 80MB becomes ~43MB that would also reduce download speed by similar amount.
Ah, so it lets you flip some of the frames over and create the other side. Ok, that makes sense.
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This feature will easily reduce the size of graphics mods that use such mirrored units by 40%.
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@StepS7578 Could you please pass the message to the dev team for putting this feature back into the game.
Also futureavailableunits json and civtechtree are not working in mod directory. Please fix them. It would be advisable to move the civtechtree json to dat folder as well like the futureavailableunits. But firstly please give them mod support.
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This suggestion will be added to our tracker. Thank you for the report.
The problem with futuravailableunits.json is already tracked on our side. civtechtrees.json should already be moddable (in a separate non-data mod).
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wow thats amazing. I think this is the first time I see devs replied for a consideration, it use to be dead silent…
thank you for continue on improving the game!
@aoescout No, civtechtree.json is not moddable (in non-data mod directory) with the current build of the game. It is loading directly from game directory.
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thank you for taking it away, realy hope this gets added
I agree. This will be useful for some modders.
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