Custom Maps, Scenarios and Going above and BR

Age of Empires II: DE II - Discussion
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Interesting things about BR:

We have all played the new Battle Royale Game mode that was introduced in the November Anniversary Update. There are a few interesting things about the BR game mode, which hint at some interesting possibilities for the game:

  1. You must have noticed that when playing BR, the game displays a message on screen saying “Player has captured a camp” or “Player has captured a castle” or “Player has no units left” that notify players of these happenings around the map. Interestingly, these message boxes are (or at least appear) identical to the ones produced by the “Display Instructions” effect that can be used in the scenario editor.
    Screenshot_4 Screenshot_2

  2. These “Display Instructions” message boxes are shown only when certain conditions (own objects, trade workshop; own objects, castle; player defeated) are met. This leads me to believe that internally, BR might be using the same condition/effect framework which the scenario editor uses for triggers.

  3. Having tried to play BR on Arabia, I found out that you do not need to use the BR maps for the game mode to work, they will actually work on any random map you want to play on. However, the game mode does not automatically generate the Gaia military buildings and the camps, those are generated by the RMS used for BR. (The BR maps are just regular RMS maps)

  4. This means that if what I have said above (point 3) is true then BR is the first game mode to utilise a condition/effect system that can be used independently on any RMS map! (the conditions and effects specific to BR are probably hardcoded, but I guess it uses the same internal framework which the scenario editor uses for making triggers possible)

What does all of this mean?

Having said all of that, you probably know where I am going with this… if it is possible for BR to do this (i.e., combine RMS and Triggers together) is there any slight chance that we might be looking at a potential scenario editor feature that incorporates this, i.e., generating random maps from an RMS each time a scenario is played?
Right now, almost anything is possible in the scenario editor. It is possible to make new and interesting, whacky or funny game modes by only using the editor (no mods required!!). I love the fact that DE’s scenario editor has been receiving so much love lately, with all the cool new effects and conditions, the xs scripts which are an absolute game-changer for scenarios, which opened up an even broader world of possibilities than ever before.
The ONLY catch with it right now is that maps in scenarios cannot be randomised, they are always the same each time they are played. This means that scenarios which are meant as custom game modes have very low replayability, and a new map must be manually generated each time that you want to play the scenario.

The main request:

If we had a feature that let us use an RMS script to randomly generate new maps each time a scenario was played, it would lift this limitation of replayability that I have mentioned above. That would bring scenarios and map-making up to a whole new level and would allow for WAAAAAAYYYY more than what was even remotely possible with UserPatch, very easily doable on DE.

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This feature would be game changing. It’d revolutionise campaigns and minigames in a way not seen before! I’d love to see this in-game!

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It would also be really helpful for practice scenarios such as those from Cicero, this way you would get used to varying map gens while training.

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Years ago I wondered, if Real World maps could have a working trigger, since they require a random map script and a base custom scenario to work. Perhaps one day .scx and .rms will merge or meet in the middle with a new game mode, mayhaps it will be BR, who knows.

Though, there are some other significant discoveries the .rms community has made with the introduction of early UserPatch features into DE, most likely these will lead quite interesting new maps.

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The UserPatch features in RMS allowed us to do soooo much on voobly. It was a lot of fun playing all the different maps people came up with. Although I feel like a merger of the condition/effect system (scenarios) and RMS will allow for even more than what was possible on voobly… with conditions, you can change things right in the middle of the game, you can create mechanics which are dynamic, which may change over time. Its a much more powerful feature if they decided to introduce it to DE!

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But this was already possible with Userpatch, Userpatch already had the feature perfectly implemented. Are we now praising MS for features that Userpatch had for Years already? What kind of “Definite” Edition is that? lol

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That is kind of harsh, don’t you think? They couldn’t use UserPatch source code so they had to develop (almost) everything themselves. So yes, I do praise them for implementing those features

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Not really, On UserPatch, they only implemented executing effects at the beginning of the game in RMS files (using the effect_amount command) but it didn’t have a feature where you could add conditions and effects to Random Maps that can be executed while the game is being played. The scenario editor did not support generating random maps from an RMS each time the game was played either, which is my feature request. This type of functionality is FAR FAR FAR more powerful than what UserPatch currently has, and will offer much more potential to map-making if it makes it into the game.

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