I remember using that feature on Age of Empires II, and it would be cool if you add a hotkey for a wholemap screenshot.
I really like to compare a map at the very start of the game, and then take another one to see how it ended.
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Yes! itâs a shame that with the great new graphics we canât do this
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Totally!
Hopefully they consider this
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This was a great feature in The Conquerors, and I think itâs a shame that it isnât available in DE. (Can you even do it in HD? I didnât play HD much so have no idea.) Iâd spend much more time in the scenario editor if this was possible.
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Wasnât possible in HD either, unfortunately.
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To me it seems quite weird to remove a feature like that, but I guess I donât know how closely HD is based on The Conquerors.
I suggested this back in 2019. Cysion gave an answer in an AoE Zone interview:
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Absolutely. Itâs like a downgradeâŠ
Oh wow! Thanks for sharing!
But as someone said before: With Capture Age partnership, would it really be that difficult to add?
I mean, that was like 3 years ago. Maybe they can add this now?
Devs please, consider adding this feature
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They changed the way the game was rendered in HD and even more so in DE.
This very likely completely broke that feature. They would have to completely reimplement it from scratch to work in the new system.
They didnât just remove it randomly.
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That makes sense, and matches up with the quote of Cysion.
I do wonder why they did this at all though. They changed the way the terrain was rendered (it used to use pre-rendered isometric tiles, and they switched to using textures), but to me, the terrain in HD looks much worse than in AoK: itâs grainy/fuzzy and doesnât interact smoothly with scrolling. On the other hand, using textures makes it much easier to mod terrains and add new ones, so maybe thatâs why.
I was never a big fan of HD, I barely played it at all. All the graphical âimprovementsâ felt pretty mediocre.
But the Definitive Edition is a whole different story. It looks amazing.
I think Capture Age has itâs own 3D renderer that reimplements everything.
It would add a relatively big extra load on the game to have capture age run in the background constantly just for big screenshots.
Just starting it up for a screenshot could be a possibility though, not sure how hard that would be to implement. It would obviously take a little time.
Especially as a feature for the scenario editor it would be really cool. It would help planing out the map layout and making promotional art.
I already used capture age in that way.
I copied a Capture Age screenshot onto my tablet to draw funny lines on the map I made to figure out a good position for player bases, river crossings, primary and secondary mission target locations and so on.
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For all of the improvements that DE made over HD, graphics is one of the things Iâm iffy on. Itâs obviously much higher definition, but itâs also a lot more drab and less colorful. I can make a jungle with a lot of different objects and stuff in HD and make it really pop, but if I moved it to DE, all that color would be lost. The real world is colorful, so I donât know why all the saturation is gone.
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Well, all HD did was rendering the water differently and having a different fire effect for burning buildings
Unless you use the enhanced graphics, itâs not actually higher definition â sprite sizes are exactly the same. Ironically, the main technical improvement is that it supports a greater range of colours (AoK/HD only supported 256 colours). The change to .SLD format boosted the saturation in a lot of cases. I understand where youâre coming from, but I think the main example is the palm/jungle trees, which had very bright green leaves in AoK/HD.
It also rendered and blended ground terrain differently, and had different cliff graphics and an incorrectly scaled farm texture.
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Oh, HD did more than just that, particularly with terrain rendering. The Steam Workshop is full of terrain mods in large part because it was much easier to make them for HD.
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Yes please! I loved those screenshots.
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Oh okay. I thought HD was basically just a port to make the game work on Win 7 with a few visual adjustments
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Ok, considering I posted this on 2023, I think this wonât see the light⊠
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It has been requested and re-requested multiple times before and after your thread. Youâre right, probably wonât see the light at this point, unless a dev internally someday wants to grab a map-wide screenshot themselves and decides to spearhead an effort internally. There isnât enough external push or support for this, just as there hasnât been (somehow) for the incessant, lengthy battle horn sounds happening every two seconds during matches, and so we live with that.
I found a Capture Age workaround, if curious. Not very convenient at all â and launching Capture Age is buggy for me (especially for non-recorded games) â so I never do it⊠but at least itâs possible:
Another thread about this:
I also submitted it as a bug report once, since it was in HD and removed in DE⊠but it got moved to the Discussion area instead.
A solution has existed with Capture Age for half-a-decade. If they really wanted to spend time figuring out and throwing together a âwhole map screenshotâ capability in AoE2:DE base game by now, perhaps by leveraging Capture Age tech, they would have done so by now. Just not enough demand for it publicly, and apparently internally, too
Some AoE4 things will probably also not see the light of day despite years of trying⊠like zoom level, UI design, and pop max count. If someone internally ever wants those things at a high enough hierarchical level, then maybe weâll get some options implemented. Until then, the public has spoken many times over the years to no avail.
The heavy focus is launching new civs and campaigns. No time to do things like âwhole map screenshotâ that donât make money. Then again, if Marketing team wants full-map screenshots for their marketing purposes (to make money), they could make it happen, too, as described by Cysion and how the original gameâs version came about. They just havenât needed that for DE yet, it seems