Is there any way for AoE2 engine to do better with water stuff? It’s looking nice, but just wondering. AoE3 does water quite a bit better, for obvious reasons, and felt it would be cool for AoE2 to get more improvements if possible, such as:
Water displacement effects as ships move?
Like normal map or whatever concentric ripples going out behind ships as AoE3 does:
Improved look of shallow water. More interesting under water features, like the cool underwater look of AoE3 as it goes from shore to deep water. But also: aqua color, reefs, coral, rocks, plant-life, and such under water. And less noticeable boxy gradation from shallow to deep (visibly square tiles)
Help show a more realistic shallow depth vs. deeper water color gradient
Introduce more possible color gradients and contrasts when going from shallow to deep. Sometimes a map author may want to have a gradual transition; others might want steep dropoff to deep sea. Either and all would be cool possibilities.
I see a ton of blue in AoE2 water maps, as if it’s the only color possible. I think the upcoming DLC will have some greens introduced, that’s cool. For tropical ocean water, I just hope it can be inspired more by AoE3 and real world someday… more greens/aqua colors would be nice, too, rather than always blue. Turquoise, as well
I bet underwater-only perspective parallax probably wouldn’t be possible to help sell the look, even though that might look cool
(… which also has a weird darkened band of water right next to the shoreline)
Non-fishable fish or schools of little fish traveling across multiple grid units under water, and near shorelines
Birds are able to fly over the map, so thought maybe it’s possible. I realize birds are probably done via a simplistic overlay(?), though, completely separate from the restrictive terrain grid. (No, not looking for fish to go across the whole screen in a straight line like birds.)
I think AoE2 currently just has fishable fish, and they’re constrained to a grid unit or two
Deeper water look when using “3D Water” setting
With 3D Water disabled, you get dark deep waters which is ngreat. When enabled, everything looks pretty shallow:
I bet some things can be nicely faked in the non-3D AoE2 engine, I just don’t know how limiting the engine is. Or if a dev genius or two can someday break the barrier or constraints of whatever gets in the way of some of this stuff being possible in the AoE2 engine
Affect? … or you mean improve? It wouldn’t be the first time things have changed or evolved in the game en masse
Besides, there are ways around that worry by keeping the old stuff “as is”, and adding new options for the new items. Here is current list… so, just add more entries. Old maps wouldn’t get affected:
Or if it truly needs engine update, then add a user-specified toggle just as “3D Water” currently has, or "bloom, “animate fog,” and “animate fog border.” Don’t want to see the cool new look to apply to your games? Just disable it in options menu. “Cool new water evolutions” vs. “Classic water”. Player decides.
I’m not a dev and that’s already a couple ways. I’m sure devs can think of dozens more ways to implement
Likewise! I had a couple animated screen captures I wanted to show from AoE3 with that, but the forum didn’t accept “.webm” files that I made. (I’ve found that file size to be smaller than animated GIFs at least in my quick tests. The forum has a tough max file size limit to meet for animated GIFs)
EDIT: Turns out MP4 is accepted. Maybe that’ll be better in the future than GIF, not sure. Here’s an .mp4 of the .webm, so quality is poor. Would be sweet. Doesn’t seem as restricted by a single map tile or two as AoE2 fish do:
They’ve done great with AoE2:DE fish. But, yes, hoping for more improvements someday:
Yep, exactly. And it could even stay inder water 99% of the time, being a shadowy mass that you know is a whale, and surface only every so often, in my opinion
One thing that might help AoE2 is the jumping fish to have little subtle white water splashes or ripples going out. Doesn’t need to be in-your-face distracting
I don’t know if it had better water effects, I will have to look later, but I did really like its deep blue color. I talked about that here before, if curious to see some AoK water screenshots compared to DE:
Man it bad, really 5 year play and do not see dolphin in the water map, why dolphin still smaller than marlin. I just think all they are merlin and fish + turtle. Really need add and improve graphics of sea wild animals animation really sad. I love whale and dolphin ( of course most interested is killer whale and humpback whale they are beautiful)
It wouldn’t be the first time things have changed or evolved in the game en masse
