I’ve been trying to get mod Lucida Blackletter into the game. Unlike in HD, fonts are not listed in the key-value-strings-utf8.txt
What I have found so far is two folder locations:
AoE2DE\resources_common\fonts
AoE2DE\resources_common\wpfg\fonts
You can get Lucida Blackletter (or any other font) in the main menu by deleting all the fonts in AoE2DE\resources_common\wpfg\fonts and putting in a font of your choice. It will also appear on the loading screen for matches.
Unfortunately, making a mod that replaces every font file in that folder doesn’t seem to work. I think I recall hearing somewhere that wpfg mods don’t work. Perhaps because those files are loaded before mods. So you have to do it manually for now.
Still though, it is a partial success:
The question remains of how to mod the remaining fonts. Within AoE2DE\resources_common\fonts there are several massive combined files with matching .txt .png .DDS .box files. I think these control most of the remaining ingame fonts. Unfortunately, I’m not sure what to do with them - they are font asset files, but I have no experience dealing with those.
Delete them and the game refuses to launch.
I managed to change the menu’s fonts following your method but still couldn’t find a way to change the in-game font. I found something called ‘Age of Empires 2 Definitive Edition Custom Font Generator’ though I don’t know how to use it. Seems like it worked in AoE:DE.
Congrats! You figure it out before I was about to tell you that you needed to compile the program with Visual Studio 2019, that’s how I did it, thanks to Reddit someone told me about it.
What is really cool is that you can actually mod 2 sets of fonts, one for Serif and one for Sans Serif as I have here:
This one for the Serif font I used the font called ‘Neuton’, I think it gives it a much modern look than Times New Roman while still retaining that ‘medieval vibe’:
For Sans Serif I chose one called Aganè which has a bold version which helps a lot with visibility in higher resolutions, the default Sans Serif font was too thin for my liking.
(I didn’t get steam till recently for other games, felt it was silly to get for one game and also thought Id have better DRM control not having the steam version. Definitely regretting not getting it on steam from the outset. I am gonna get the bundle on steam when AOE 3 DE drops in price)
@Zetnus So now that I have it on Steam and can actually edit the files, what I am supposed to do? Just replace the wpfg fonts or can I edit the ‘straight’ fonts folder. I am confused.
How did you get the tool to work though? I ran the release version of the Font Generator, it says to have the TexConv.exe in the Libs folder - I do have the file, although the thing might be corrupted. I tried to redownload the whole tool, it still doesn’t work.
I’d really appreciate some help. Here’s the tool’s dialogue:
"Generation started. Initializing… Trying to extract all glyph information… Successfully generated glyph information of 3952 char(s). Trying to draw all glyphs to atlases… Successfully generated 1 atlas(es) and 3952 char(s)’ information. Trying to save 1 images to disk… Error occured and the generation process has been terminated. Error: Cannot execute TexConv.exe to generate textures successfully. Please make sure this tool exists in the “Libs” directory and is not corrupted."
