The first release of Age of Empires II was in 1999. So my understanding is that a lot of the core code in AOE2DE was probably written in 1999 or before. I have some questions for anyone who actually worked with the code in any of the Age of Empires 2 products over the last 25 years:
- Is the code from 1999 more buggy than the modern code added in later years?
- Is the code from 1999 hard to read and understand?
- Does the old code make it difficult to add new features to the game?
- Does the old code make it difficult to fix bugs?
- Does the old code cause new bugs to arise when AOE2DE is updated?
I hear a lot of disparaging comments from the community that makes it sound like the answers to all these questions are “yes”, but I am curious to know if it’s true from someone who would actually know. Thanks!
P.S. I’m a C/C++ software developer myself so I don’t mind hearing intricate technical details.
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- No I dont think so
- Probably yes
- Not necessary, but it looks like it
- Not really, bugs are caused by features introduced, because the base game is more or less bug-free
- I don’t think so. It’s just the Quality insurance of the current devs is sooo bad, literally. Like they introduced Scrolling in Tech tree that puts you to that building by pressing it’s “select all e.g Docks” puts you to dock. But when you didn’t set that hotkey it auto scrolls to dock always, unable to use the tech tree.
This is just one of a lot of examples that proves they don’t playtest. LIke Burgundians 200 attack Hand Cannoneers
Tbh nobody forced them to write DE on a 20 year old engine
thanks for your insight mr. dev it’s very clear from your post that you’ve never written a line of code in your life lol.
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From what I read about a guy that overseer part of the game and even worked at Starlink and many other places as dev, he said Aoe2 was very clean coded, very organized.
You mean pre-DE? DE has way too many bugs
Man the engine is older, from the first aoe game, probably developed back at 1995 and used in 1997.
DE is just a massive mod, with the code tuned to change the network connection and the QoL improvements, other than it is still the same as the vanilla one.
The code is very sensitive, any small change affects other things, that is why is hard for them to find the new bugs, the team in charge of the user patch without access to the code were having the same issues when trying to fix the patrolling bug, if that was only modifying the exe imagine modifying the actual code.
But i have hopes, that maybe in +2025 a new remaster will see the light on anew engine.
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