For me, the decaying effect is a crucial element of an RTS game.
And the original AOE1 and 2 did a good job on that.
However, something has changed when that came to AOE2 DE.
I understand if Devs tried to add the original decaying effect, the workload will too heavy to be done.
But still, the current decaying effect is lame.
What on earth do you call this?
My experience tells me that they are bodies, meanwhile my eyes argue that they are not
Let’s watch how Heroes of Annihilated Empires handle with bodies.
Well, after bodies become transparent and disappear, there remain skeletons.
Player can tell by the first glance that these are bodies.
So, why dont Devs change perspectives to handle this?
Just make the bodies diretly turn into skeletons rather than sinking into the dirt.
Just like this:
Devs just need to make three types of skeletons—— infantry、 calvary、 elephant.
Only 2 -3postures、 8 directions for each types are needed.
For Devs, this kind of workload is possible to handle.
And for players , they can finally tell by their eyes that bodies are bodies.
This will satisfy both sides.
Wow! I like this graphic. lets see if this is taken up.
It would be weird for dead troops to immediately turn into a skeleton. Maybe leave a skeletton for some time after the decay animation is over ?
I don’t see the skeletons as an improvement to be honest. It’s kind of cheesy. I’d just leave it as it is, cause you can clearly see where a previous battle took place but it doesn’t interfer with live units.
I think I know why they changed it. With the original graphics, units turning into skeletons after death is a bit more believable and less goofy. However, with HD, modern graphics, it would look either really silly or rather morbid.
I like the bodies sinking into the ground because it reminds me of Phantasy Star Online, where killed enemies do the same thing, except faster and they leave a permanent pool of blood on the ground where they died. That’s my favorite game, btw, so I like being reminded of it.
One interesting idea I have to enhance that : if some friendly units enter a battlefield where many soldiers recently died, and are not engaged in combat, add some makeshift graves (wooden crosses for christian civs for example) for friendly units and mass graves or piles of dead bodies for enemies. None having any hitbox, just for visuals.
If left unattended with no units around for a while, have some crows and rats appear to feast on the poor souls slain on the battlefield (visual only, maybe make them flee if a significant number of troops arrive).
Morbid yes, but realistic. Would probably be an optional mod to avoid forcing that on younger players.
the issue with Skeletons is you have to get rid of the bodies at some point, in the original, if you were looking at a 5 minute old battlefield all the skeletons would disappear one by one which looked silly. the sinking is intended to not stick out when the unit fully disappears.
AOM and Rise of Nations do the opposite: the unit first sinks into the ground, becomes transparent then turn into a skeleton.
Wasn’t removing skeletons done due to chinese game censorship?
That figures. 20 characters.
I don’t think that’s the reason.
I strongly agree. I would like the skeletons back (as well as more lions).
I remember there was random fossiles on the ground too.
Keep in mind time is vastly accelerated in Aoe 1 and 2.
Every second is a year.
So with that in mind, units turning into skeletons after a few seconds make sense.
It’s a great mod, however I still want the skeleton back.
I’d like to make a graphics mod for Skeletons. It’s on my todo list. Will require a bit of infrastructure to setup though, I’d like to use the new SLD format instead of the old SMX format, but the tooling for working with those isn’t quite developed yet (no Turtle Pack or SLX Studio equivalent atm).
Just taking a screenshot of AoC vs DE, the dead bodies and skeletons are much better in the original.
