100% agreed.
I have the small trees mod installed, and the grass and bushes are too conspicuous to differ from trees.
Fish is also difficult to be discovered for its inconspicuous.
For an RTS game, these issues are very annoying.
As far as I know now, replacing all trees with only one desired should be easy.
I still don’t know how to edit those graphics, but about replacing them with other file or put them as a null value it’s fairly possible
I just tried replacing all of the text of each tree with bamboo and it causes the game to crash. I think certain values within the smx files must be retained for each tree but I don’t have software to read smx files.
Wow, crazy that you managed to create those!
I think the one with masks looks better because there is less contrast across the terrains, but is messier so it’s a hard call. If the one with masks was less messy it’d be ideal… but it’s still a huge improvement from the base game.
I’m just wondering how well it works with https://www.ageofempires.com/mods/details/1064/ taking into account that this mod already adjusts terrain and reduces eye strain.
To show the impact of each mod, especially the difference between the Zetnus and Donstyles (less eye strain) mods, I took some screenshots. https://imgur.com/a/V1AzSxR
I’ve been messing around with smoothing terrains as well and I’m having the same problem you’re having. I keep getting these artifacts, even with terrain blending off:
Even if the .dds image is 1 single color, the terrain gets these weird irregularities in it:
On a separate note, does anyone know the difference between \textures\2x and \textures\1x? I noticed that the default 2x terrains are 2048 x 2048 and 1x 1024 x 1024. Which ones are used when?
About the difference between 2x and 1x I really don’t know. But when I was exploring “Zetnus improved Grid” I saw he didn’t even touch the 1x folder. Maybe those folders make the difference between Enhanced Graphics ON and OFF, I don’t know.
The game doesn’t currently use the textures in 1x, regardless of whether or not you use the UHD pack.
(If this gets fixed, I’ll have to update my grid mod :p)
I hope that this will not get fixed, because using higher resolution terrain does not seem to be bad for performance. If this gets fixed, then I would have to use a mod for using higher resolution terrain while having UHD disabled.
Can someone make a mod where dead units remain fully above ground until disappearing instead of sinking almost immediately into ground?
I think, that currently dead units remain visible for quite reasonable amount of time. Problem is that they are visible as tiny asses above ground instead of full bodies.
Sinking might also happen, but just before disappearing, after dead unit has spent enough time fully above ground.
This mod should definitely not be a data mod.
Just to let everyone know, During the Beta, I experimented with using the 1024 Textures and created some 512 Textures to see what impact it had on the game. For me at least, the lower resolution had practically no impact on performance. With the latest build, using the 1024 Textures still doesn’t have any impact on performance.
During the beta, I made 1024 and 2048 versions of the grid textures. The 2048 version crashed for me until I removed the farm textures (ie. reducing the overall texture budget slightly), and it still crashed for some other people with lower amounts of RAM. So on release, I only uploaded the 1024 version, which has a considerably lower filesize, and seems to work for everyone.
Fair enough. I have 12GB of RAM, which is above recommended for DE, but low by today’s standards (apparently). I did some more testing with 512x512 textures, still didn’t help much performance wise for me, but funny enough, there doesn’t seem to be any graphical difference on a 1080p Monitor between 2048x2048 and 512x512 Textures. Even when fully zoomed in, there seems to be no difference.
I’ll probably upload a 512x512 Texture Mod later onto the Mod Page to see if that could help people with 8GB’s of RAM or less.
Thanks to Tincho’s modding work I’ve completed my own terrain mod. It’s essentially his base mod with a finer grid and some other minor changes. https://www.ageofempires.com/mods/details/1557
