So it turns out in the most recent patch the Britons Wonder has had its roof recoloured. It now looks like verdigris-covered copper. Here’s a before-and-after comparison (pre-patch on the left, post-patch on the right).
I’m not really sure why they did this – if it really is supposed to be Chichester Cathedral (or almost any other medieval English church) then the previous roof – presumably supposed to be made of lead – was more historically appropriate.
Has anyone else noticed any other graphical changes with the latest patch?
Holy monkeys! Only you would notice something like that. Then again, that’s a super random change for a patch that AFAIK didn’t overhaul any other graphics (then again, I stopped looking when I saw they didn’t add any new units, and the Mounted Samurai/Hero graphics remained unchanged).
Part of me wonders if they did this just to see if anyone would notice.
Shame, that’s pretty much the number one graphical change I’d like to see.
Nice pun. I like to think they did it specifically for me – although I can’t be the only AoE2 player with an interest in English church architecture… right?!
Thank you for the report TommoChocolate, I’m forwarding this information to the team and we’ll investigate whether that was an unintended change which was introduced alongside the graphical asset file optimization or not.
Oh, wow, you think this might have been unintentional? I’d assumed it must have been deliberate. It’s as if someone in the art team realised Chichester Cathedral has a copper roof, and changed it for “accuracy” without realising that the copper roof is post-medieval.
First of all, it’s very nice that you reduced the game size for everybody.
It still surprised me though that you haven’t fixed the oversized Eastern European stable while you changed every single SLX game file to the SLD format:
Having actually played the game properly with the new patch, I think actually the green saturation has increased across the board. It’s particularly noticeable on berry bushes and certain trees. Presumably the compression has messed up the palette somehow?
This is technically by design - previously, due to the limited 256 color space of the old graphics format, some colors would get automatically reduced to accommodate the palette. The new graphics are full-color, and thus more closely match the way they actually were produced by the Art team. In general, you should expect to see higher color variety on every asset.
Although such sprites now look exactly as designed, we appreciate the feedback.
Unlike the original AoE2, each graphic in AoE2 DE before the latest update had its own 256-color palette rather than a shared one, so color reduction was different in each case. Some sprites may also have had less red or blue. In the original post’s specific example, the deficit color was green.
Would be good for a suitable modding tool to be provided to the modding community which can handle the SLD format files and also these palette issues and colour conversion matters.
Interesting. I’m sure I’ll get used to it but it is inevitably a bit weird when the graphics change unannounced in a game I’ve been playing for almost three years.
This building already had several historical accuracy issues, but I’ve been restraining myself from commenting on those…
It does seem to have affected a lot of green things - I’ve noticed it mostly on trees and bushes. (But, that said, I haven’t had much chance to play since the update.)
Better to use the opportunity to implement AoE3DE’s 100% customizable player colors, with one additional improvement: multiple built-in profiles to choose from. On the other hand, such built-in profiles can be added to AoE3DE.
Also, I’ve believed since the early previews of AoE2DE that the new blue player color is too deep into spectral (B of RGB) blue, and is very unpleasant to look at - dark on a bad display device, eye-searing on a good device with a wide gamut. The B value needs to be turned down a notch. You can compare it with AoE3, where the player blue also leans into spectral B, but the B value isn’t nearly as high.
