Porting improved buildings to DE

Age of Empires II: DE II - Modding
1

Hi all,

I’ve always been impressed by many of the much more unique and realistic looking building artwork that is commonly seen in Voobly games. For an example of one set, see the MSC tournament from a couple of years ago:

I don’t know which mod Memb is using here, perhaps one of the below?

It looks like there was also some work done on improved building mods in the HD/2013 edition, e.g.:

The new civs added to DE have some nice building artwork, but I still feel that the artwork for many of the older civs, as based on the original game / AoC, isn’t as distinctive as some of the custom content made over the years since. I think it’s nice to have more unique and relevant building styles for every civ. But I haven’t been able to find any mods that bring this kind of upgrade to DE. I’m curious if anyone is working on this already?

I can possibly provide some assistance with upscaling existing artwork to a better quality if that helps at all. I’ve had a go at doing this for the last mod above to give an idea of what is achievable, since the author has kindly made the source files available here: AO2AR by colorfiction

Here is a quick animation preview of the results: Animated-Comparison hosted at ImgBB — ImgBB (click to magnify to better see the difference)
And you can download the full set of upscaled files here: Oxam-Architecture-Renovation_Upscaledx4.zip
Probably they could do with some additional touch-up work on some of the finer details but you get the idea. Feel free to make use of them as suggested by the original author:
“You are free to use this in your mods, a credit to Oxam (the creator) would be nice :)”

Are there other image files available that could potentially be ported to DE? It would be nice to collect together all previous mods and combine into a single “best of the best” improved buildings mod.

Apologies if this has been discussed already, but the only relevant thread I could find on this topic in these forums is here:

2

You cant use any of the buildings in HD or original game in DE.they dont have the crumbling destruction animations the DE buildings have.

3

Ah, I hadn’t thought of that, and thanks for clarifying. It’s a real shame that it makes modding so much more difficult. I don’t suppose it’s possible to make use of the existing animations in the game and associate them with new building images? Perhaps it wouldn’t look too bad if the visual changes are more minor (i.e. so that the main structure still more or less matches with the destruction animation). But then again, I think there is also a bit at the very start of the animation where the building is just about to crumble, but still apparent in full detail, so that bit would probably need to be removed at least… Oh well.

4

There were few attempts to get destruction animations manually done but its no easy task.

5

Everything you need is freely available. You don’t need the crumbling destruction animation, it only plays for a second or so and with a little creativity you can make something simple that will suffice.

https://aok.heavengames.com/cgi-bin/forums/display.cgi?action=ct&f=9,44685,,30