it has everything related as engine is the basis for mod tools and the brief menton of the state of it and evrything that gets updated and goes to mod tools.
No, it isnât, and Iâve already explained why. Not particularly interested in going in circles.
but if dont refute and it comes in circles means that the funmdament premise of your counter argument dont hold for specific which i would guess it going towards easy to use mod tools =/= gud one but in that one the pÂŽrevious one you culd with not specialiazed knowloadge and you can make zoom in cutscenes which in aoe 4 i dont see anything of that on current tools as far asd i played.
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It doesnât hold because you donât want it to. Thatâs not an argument, thatâs not a discussion.
Iâve already explained the mod tools. If you were actually interested, youâd know what they can do, and not just what they canât. But you donât.
or maybe because they already refute all your solid point which we went to this point you re starting to meltdown. no need to go down just link the evidence that you say its the truth and the one that counterargument. mod tool until now is too complex for the average mod toll user entusiasts.
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Some good points in this thread, skimmed most of it. Saw some talk about the engine. Just wanted to say that the replay system sucks and itâs my understanding itâs the engineâs fault and it will never be possible to have a rewind feature in replays because of how the engine works. In a game all about real time strategy, where single decisions and moments can sway the game, why would they not invest more into a replay system. There are many games these days that I can watch a replay from any 3d angle, at any speed, with full control of the camera and playback. AoE4 feels like itâs decades old lacking this fundamental feature. I have to wait 5 minutes with the replay on 8x if I want to watch something that happened at the end of a 45 minute game. And you can only see it once then you have to restart the entire replay⊠The engine has less tech capabilities than a VHS tape. And every time thereâs a tiny update, the engine invalidates all of the old replays. Thatâs garbage.
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i can peacefully agree that replay system of aoe4 comes on top as the worst in the franchise, i do prefer local saving of ogs, ofc replay breaking after every single patch is just going backwards in progress, this never happened in specifically aoe2 and 3 to my knowledge (played those for close to 17 years so bits like this donât escape me anymore)
i think tho that similarly to input latency of essence and how it does physics (namely being locked to 30 fps at all times), replay system being as is isnât by mistake most likely
doesnât make the engine unusable, but is imo a good area of investigation for relic
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Improvements to replays are one of the big community requests. I hope the devs are able to action this at some point.
I have no doubt itâs difficult, but I think itâd be worth it. Age IV has the interest to make it worth the investment imo.
Like I said, weâve been over this. Games are now more complex than they were years ago. You can keep complaining that the tools are more complicated, but I donât care anymore. You donât care why they are, and youâre likely not even going to use them anyway.
iâd say the question isnât if relic can patch the engine in these areas, yk the areas constantly called out by aoe community, quite a few major areas at that, but rather, how high (or low) on the priority list these potential fixes are, i think relic is aware most of these improvements would benefit their own ips as well, they certainly arenât stupid, even if it doesnât always look that way, my point is, thereâs plenty of areas that work fine (remember aoe2 and 3 DE multiplayer services use relicâs system as basis, and that one works fine mostly)
(i donât know if they use microsoft or relic servers, but ik they use relicâs multiplayer backend code, think you can dig that up @GorbMort ?)
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its mostly good points except for some flawed opinions asserted from a specific singular entity.
again complexity doesnt mean it have to be an adventure or a rollercoaster for the finalñ user. theres a reasom why previous mod tools wasnt too complex beside the limitation of the engine. also you dont care why it must be there and you only think is only a issue from me and not from others.
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Yes. Because games were less technically-complex. Thatâs the reason.
Mod tools arenât known for their fantastic UX 
Iâm not denying folks find the Age IV tools complex. But other people would actually at least try to respect my explanation of why this is the case. You donât.
In case Iâm wrong, DM me. This has gone on long enough and if you do want to understand, Iâm happy to explain there instead of dragging this out here.
Honestly, not sure. They have / had something called Battle Servers that we responsible for centralising / equalising ping. I believe the network model was still P2P. But the last time they mentioned these explicitly was back in 2017 or so (unless theyâve mentioned them with regards to CoH 3).
Well said! xD
Yep, true!
A fair case!
Yep! Almost everyone complained about mod UI and how difficult it is to mod everything except the maps!
AOE 1,2,3 all have extremely simple modding tools.
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AOE4âs Essense Content Editor modding tool got horrible UI
Everyone complains about it.
I myself, tried it and mode many modes, and I know they made a mess in it.
It has points where it states automatic guns etc, are clearly made for COH3, not for AOE4.
It also has comments like âarmoured vehicleâ âMachine Gunâ, and "Bullet ############ all for WW2, etc not medieval-era words.
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I think what Gorb is missing and sadly being too assertive of, is that there are multiple ways Mod tools can manifest. Traditionally in Age games however, they were user friendly and were utilized by casual players who wanted to mess about in itâlike a sandbox. This is not very feasible with the current iteration of the Editor, as though it is a complex tool and useful for more advanced modders, it offers next to none of that sandbox experience people enjoyed from past editors.
Remember, ease of access is often king with these types of things. Say instead of an Editor, Age games had a little minigame where you could âpaintâ over any models and thus, players were able to customize units and save them for personal use. Say it was as simple as a small scene with the loaded model and a few colours on the side for you to select and paint over with.
Now, imagine that this is what players were used to. They were used to the simplicity of going into this little scene and painting their english units with Manchester logos. Or paint the units to look like shrek, or whatever.
If in AOE4, instead of having that little simple scene that anyone in-game could click into and play with as a sandbox, Relic just gave you all the modelâs files with their UVs intact and gave you free licenses to Substaince Painter so you could âmodâ each model yourself, is that accessable and useful for the majority?
The answer is no. This scenario is obviously a lot more different than what has happened, but I hope you see that modding is more than people making complex scenarios, maps and minigames. The current Editor WORKS for that, albeit in a non user friendly way. What IS lost however, is the single player consumerâs ability to have that Age experience of playing in a sandbox for themselves. Sure, you CAN do it through the AOE4 Editor. After you download it. After you figure out how the extremely CONSUMER unfriendly UI works. After you learn how developer tools are used.
If you think the Editor is sufficient then you have greatly misunderstood why it is a staple in AOE games. It isnât a staple because they were complex and clunky developer tools meant for serious modders. It was a staple because it was a great bit of single-player fun activity that you could mess with if you got bored of Campaign or Skirmish. The fact that it doubled as a useful editor was a plus.
In addition to a laughable campaign, AOE4 didnât come with an editor originally, and when it was finally launched, it did not offer the experience single player users were looking for. There is a reason people complain about this game, and often times is because so many expectations were not met. Whether it was due to time restrictions, budgetary issues or straight up developers who didnât understand AOE, who knows.
But, also, who cares. They missed the mark, and that is all. No reason to endlessly defend mistakes.
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Great quote!
Nailed the crucial point, where he is confused or lost
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Theyâll probably actually date from CoH 2, just like CoH 2 has Dawn of War data in it.
Thatâs the thing about game engines. Stuff carries over. I appreciate itâs not something you understand (or have to understand), but âitâs complicatedâ is because what the tools are enabling us to do is complicated.
The tools have a ton of documentation that goes through and explains a lot of how to use it. âeveryoneâ Iâve talked to finds the guides Relic write to be super-helpful.
Iâm not missing that at all. But old tools arenât necessarily âuser friendlyâ. You still need guides, instructions, whatever. This has always been the case, even with something as famous as the mapmod tools that came with Warcraft 3.
Youâre telling me this is user-friendly?
Download third-party tool from Github. Make sure you have the right software that it runs for. Learn a bunch of custom filetypes. This is just to get at the files to make changes.
Letâs look at something like editing the AI:
Sorry, this is user friendly? What does âuser friendlyâ mean to you? In what world can you compare all of this, to a tool you can launch straight from Steam that has official developer documentation about how to use it?
The âcasual experienceâ youâre talking about was only possible because of huge, community-driven efforts to create their own tools. To understand the custom file formats. The casual modding experience in past AoE games came from the community.
The same can happen here. Itâs not a âmistakeâ, and so long as you characterise it as such, I will explain that you simply donât get it. We need the advanced tools, to make the things more casual players can benefit from. There are roadblocks to something like a âsandboxâ map that lets you muck about with units. We need the devs to add modding support for specific things, so that then we can enable others to do stuff.
Where would AoE III modding be without with Resource Manager? Youâre telling me that the tools arenât user friendly, and that Relic missed the mark, when the best thing older games have are third-party tools and documentation that requires you to tweak a bunch of settings before you even run the game?
This is normal for modding! But I donât think you understand how modding works at all. I think youâve benefited from decades of community support that enables less technical folk to tweak and mess with the game. I donât think you understand the separation between âgiving us the tools we need to modify the gameâ and âpeople creating their ownâ.
lol
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Because you rode in on your noble horse to participate in an existing tangent about the tools themselves and how user friendly they are.
Itâs not my fault you didnât check the context. My guess here - not a strawman - just a guess, because youâre being extremely unforthcoming about what you actually want to talk about, is youâre fixating on the lack specifically of the Scenario Editor. No other tools, no other part of the mod scene, just the Scenario Editor.
Am I right? I have an answer lined up here, but I want to make sure this assumption is somewhere near the money.
You are indeed wrong. I suspect because you failed to read my comment, which I urge you to try to do again. And instead of immediately attempting to construct a defense which always seems to be your first instinctâtry to actually think about what is in the contents of it.
You strawmanned because your whole argument hinges on that modding tools is ony for modders. Yet you fail to recognize, despite me urging you to look into the past, that these tools were great bonuses that came with the game, and were great fun besides the single player campaign experience.
You wonât recognize this, ever will you?
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So if youâre not talking about the Scenario Editor (which is the tool that existed in past Age of Empires games that allowed users to create a map, place units, and eventually create things like triggers and so on), what tools are you talking about?
Because, once again, youâre ran all the way around the field, hurling insults around the place, without actually explicitly saying what it is that Age IV doesnât have.
The only thing I can think of is the Scenario Editor. Thatâs the casually-accessible thing from Age games released between the late 90s and 2005 that most people refer to. There is a reason why a game in 2023 doesnât have something that simplistic, of course. But you wonât ever recognise that, will you 
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