Guide to Modding?

I’d like to make a music mod but there seems to be no guide anywhere on how I would go about doing this? I appear to need AoE II DE specific game files but I don’t see any place where I could package the files into whatever format the game needs. I also don’t know what music file formats are supported. The “Install Instructions” guide on the site only points to an AoE I DE help page and only covers installing scenario mods, nothing about music.

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I’m trying to figure it out as well, but the files you need are in your games install location (for Steam, this is C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\AoE2DE\resources\_common ).

Mods you create, go into C:\Users\USERNAME\Games\Age of Empires 2 DE\LONGSTRINGNUMBERS\mods\local\ where you make a new folder named for your mod. In there, there is file named info.json which contains

{"Author":"Yourname","Description":"your description, which will show in the side bar","Title":"The title that will show in game"}

So in your mods/local folder, if you wanted to replace the mainmenu_bg.jpg, it would look like this:

mods/local
|---MyModName
    |---info.json
    |---resources  
        |---_common
            |---wpfg
                |---resources
                    |---mainmenu
                        |---mainmenu_bg.jpg

But this is as far as I have gotten, and cannot get my mod to load to test it.

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Advanced Genie Editor. This is a program for editing data of genie (DAT and DLL) files. It can edit properties of units, civilizations, technologies, graphics, terrains, sounds, player colors and some other things.

Old Advanced genie Editor is outdated. “AoE2DE\Tools_Builds\AdvancedGenieEditor3.exe” is new version for DE. It created a data mod, which is very restrictive (only one data mod can be active at once, not usable in campaigns, cumbersome to use in multiplayer, etc).

Modders should create mods by replacing individual files and avoiding data modding whenever possible.

It is a good idea to subscribe to couple of mods and learn their file structure. This shows, how to do things :slight_smile:

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Bump ^

Just out of curiousity to see if I could put this together locally I followed that above file structure to the letter. I downloaded a mod called ‘Main Menu Night’ by a ‘StepwiseMango88’ but I just can’t seem to get it working?
Does anyone have any ideas as to why? Would I need to publish before it accepts it?

Motivation- just looking for a sense of acomplishment from a super simple main menu image replacement I made.

Thumbnail and info.jso appears but mod doesnt actually change anything.
My file structure is the same,
My image is .dds same res as as the modder’s img

Any help appreciated! thanks :blush:

Did you placed it into the local mods folder with appropriate name (without numeric prefix)? Try deleting thumbnail and info.json files.

Thanks Yorok0! But it looks like I found the issue. My background image wasn’t the right file type it accepted the .dds file type I thought it had saved as one but when I fixed that it works now. Thank you for the quick reply :smile:

It’s a real basic public one called Misty Lake Menu :smile:

Could there be a terror in the deep below the surface of lake?..

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