The procedure is a bit exhausting… I compiled openage library to extract the sprite sheet which includes all the 960 frames of an smx file: And yes there are no shadows but you can choose player palette color in your extraction command
Compiling openage using my ubuntu machine
git clone https://github.com/SFTtech/openage.git
cd openage
./configure
make
cd bin
python3 -m openage convert-file --player-palette-file ~/games/aoe2de/Data/playercolor_blue.pal --palette-file ~/games/aoe2de/Data/b_west.pal u_elite_eagle.smx /tmp/rofl.png
In the command above you can choose different color palette and extract the png file (sprite sheet)
After you extract all the sprite sheets you’ll have to cd into convert folder and edit ‘texture.py’
nano openage/openage/convert/texture.py
Then replace these lines:
for frame in input_data.main_frames:
for subtex in self._smp_to_subtextures(frame,
main_palette,
player_palette,
custom_cutter):
frames.append(subtex)
With these lines:
frame_ctr = 0
for frame in input_data.main_frames:
for subtex in self._smp_to_subtextures(frame,
main_palette,
player_palette,
custom_cutter):
self.image_data = subtex
frame_name = "frame_%s" % (frame_ctr)
frame_ctr += 1
self.save(Directory("/home/user/frames/").root, frame_name)
frames.append(subtex)
and cd back into openage folder again and rebuild the project
make
Now use the same command as previously:
python3 -m openage convert-file --player-palette-file ~/games/aoe2de/Data/playercolor_blue.pal --palette-file ~/games/aoe2de/Data/b_west.pal u_elite_eagle.smx /tmp/rofl.png
Done your 960 frames are extracted into /home/user/frames as png filetype images