With Advanced Genie Editor, I found various idle animations that one won’t see in-game by default, but that can be made visible with the Modify Attribute trigger. Including the grazing animations of Cows and Deer seen above.
I wonder why those are unused? Actually, each Cow (at least in the case of Gaia) is assigned a second standing graphic (internally called “IdleB”), as seen in A.G.E., yet the animals never alter between idle animations in-game. A bug, maybe? If one tries to modify Standing Graphic 2 of the Cows with a trigger, the game crashes. Same case for the Sheep (though its alternate standing animation isn’t that different).
The Deer isn’t assigned an IdleB animation at all, yet it exists (its “attack” graphic is a shorter version).
There are various other unused animations, mostly alternate poses rather than something that complements the first graphic. The (European) King folding his arms like he did before DE, for example.
If I’m not mistaken, the Ostrich is the sole huntable/herdable/wild animal with a working IdleB animation.
If all what I told above is old stuff and was already documented, including the unused graphic IDs, let me know.
This is new to me. So I noticed that the destruction graphics for Greek houses is also wrong; it reverts to a construction plot destruction. They should add these cow/deer animations in to the game like the Ostrich.
I’d like to share my findings. Graphic IDs with * are assigned to the Gaia unit according to Genie Editor, but are not even seen when placing the respective unit for Gaia.
711* / 2233 - Cataphract, horse moving
763 - Deer grazing
836* - Cow B grazing
841* - Cow C grazing
845* - Cow A grazing
880 - Elite Skirmisher with javelin on the shoulder
931 - Knight, horse moving its head to the sides
1010* / 1564 - Mangudai, horse moving
1101* - Militia being less threatening
1135* - Cow D grazing
1166 / 1839 - Teutonic Knight with drawn sword
1850* - European King folding arms
1913* - Photonman crouching
2636* - Two-Handed Swordsman holding sword differently (identical 2682 used for Henry II)
2648* - Pikeman holding pike with both hands
2661* - Heavy Pikeman holding pike with both hands
2803* - Light Cavalry, horse moving (identical 2482 used for Scythian Scout)
2923 / 10389 - Southeast Asian King with face not in the chatra’s shadow
3177 - Sheep waggling with the ears
3914 - Prithviraj, horse moving
10313 - Arambai, horse moving
10576* - Imperial Skirmisher with javelin on the shoulder
10500 - Decaying Flaming Camel
15787 - Mercenary Peltast with javelin on the shoulder
There might be more, I stopped checking for now. Would be much easier if the Genie Editor displayed sprite previews for AoE2 DE.
The unused graphics of Cataphract, Mangudai, Light Cavalry, Prithviraj and Arambai are probably oversights, almost all horse cavalry units use such animations.
We need the Bactrian and Dromedary camels in game to have trade goods on their backs, like the donkey does. Also the horse. We need more variation in the editor for trade cart-like units.
Only the alternate idle animations have IDs in the dataset, but more SLX files can be found in the game folder, which also show earlier names of those units. The filenames contain “equites”, “companion”, or “sarmatian” (from lowest to highest unit in the line).
