News archive
AoEII: AoK E3 Awards
Age of Empires II: Age of Kings scooped up a few awards during the recent Electronics Entertainment Exposition held in Atlanta last
month:
- OGR - 1998 "E3 Pick: Best of the Best" Award
- Adrenaline Vault - E3 Best RTS Game
- The Perfect Game - E3 Best RTS Game
- GameSpot - Best E3 Games
Get the details from the ES site.
Thanks to Steve for this info. He also sent me more info about the expansion:
The Rise of Rome - new fact sheet
I have posted the entire fact sheet at a seperate page. Here is the most important information:
- Four new civilizations: Carthage, Palmyra, Macedonia and Rome
- Totally new units: Camel Rider, Scythe Chariot, Slinger, Fire Galley and Armored Elephant
- Roman Architecture, including the Roman Colosseum
- Challenging Campaigns
- Larger map size/Different map types: Hill Country, Narrows, Mediterranean, and Continental.
- Epic Music and sounds: new sound tracks
AoE and Win98
I do not use Win9x anymore myself, but I have heard that the Internet Explorer 4 in Win98 takes away up to 10 MB of memory. This means that you should not install Win98 if you have 16 MB of RAM. You may get problems running Age of Empires due to lack of memory. There is no need anyway to buy the CD - just download the latest TCP/IP patch (msdun20.exe or something alike), which will compensate for the huge performance loss introduced by the 1.2 patch. Other than that and new drivers, Win98 does not introduce anything new, so buying it makes only sense if you rather want to spend $100 than a few minutes downloading the new drivers you need.
Interview with Brad Crow
Ensemble Studios has an interview with Brad Crow, lead artist of Age of Empires 2, at their page:
"For a game that has as much historical flavor as Aoe, a lot of the look has already been designed. It is up to our team to find historical references that fit our vision for the game."
AoE2 theme: Gates
Do not worry, Microsoft has not completely taken over ES yet ;) This week, Ensemble's page has a few screenshots about gates in AoE2. They will allow you to structure your town into different parts, with a castle in the center. There was a castle in Switzerland where this was done to an extreme; it was structured into no less than about 30 parts, all of them divided by walls and connected with gates. As a result of this, the castle become nearly impossible to conquer.
The screenshot shows another use (and danger) of Gates: they can crush anything underneath.
Become an AoE league administrator!
The Solid Gold Gaming League, one of the best leagues on the net, wants to expand and build up an AoE league (currently, the people there have a Starcraft and a Warcraft 2 league running). They are looking for administrators and referees. If you are interested, contact me. The administrator would ultimately be responsible for the health of the
league. Specifically this means being the final authority in
disciplinary matters, and being responsible for the recruiting, training
and overseeing of the referees. The refs would also function as a
support base and sounding-board for major decisions.
You will also learn how to organize such events, and the members of the league will help you. For me, the SGGL is just the league. They will play with selected scenarios, and quality is more important than quantity. There are a lot of excellent old school players in the War2 league, and it is as cheater-free as possible.
Telcontar signing off for two days
I will be away today and tomorrow, so there will be no replies to your e-mails and no updates till then. If anything important happens, please let me know.
Interview with Stephen Rippy
The very frequent updates at Ensemble's page do not stop, and today, they have an Interview with Stephen Rippy, Music Director at ES. He tells us what a working day for a composer looks like and about the music in AoE2:
"There will still be elements of multiculturalism, but the melodies will be much more authentic to the game's time period."
If you want to read the interviews from his brother, Chris Rippy, go to the Interviews section at this page.
New sound mod pack
Mythlord has created a new mod (.zip, 750 KB) consisting of some of the sounds that can be found at the taunts page. Some pretty funny sounds from "Star Wars" and "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" can be found there. The file was broken when Mythlord sent it to me, and it took a while to fix it. Now it works (instructions are given in the .txt file: unzip into the AoE directory, run 'minstall Mod(from_taunts)' then). It also proved WinZip to be a dumbed down program, with a nice GUI but a lack of important options - I recommend Pkzip, which is much better (though it cannot beat gzip).
Feedback from Ian Fischer about the suggestions
Ian Fischer, one of the lead designers of AoE2, tells us what he thinks about the latest suggestions. I had to truncate his answer a bit for this page; for the entire transcript, go to this page.
> dividing the map into shires that have to be defended.
[Ian Fischer]
"This is an "AoE mod", a new way to play the game. We're looking
into several of these at this time."
> harmful weather and famines.
[Ian Fischer]
"We have toyed with these and will continue to look at them but
my personal feeling about this is that if you make it strong enough to
have an impact on the game then you also create the possibility of
having a player get beaten by a random event."
> voice communication with other players
[Ian Fischer]
"This technology (talking with other players over the internet)
is still fairly young and, from what I've seen of it, the performance
isn't that great. (...) So the question then becomes -- would you rather we work
on the game or internet phone technology? :)"
> keeps as an integral entity in the game, upgrades either to stronghold or castles (with different benefits).
"[Ian Fischer]
You got it. You'll see something like this in the game."
> non-siege units can no longer damage buildings with their weapons
(but they can put them on fire).
[Ian Fischer]
"We've toyed with various versions of this. From what I've seen,
fires become too much of a micromanagement thing (you've got to do
something to put them out, right -- otherwise what is the point?). And
they also make it very easy for a player to crush another once in his
town."
AoE2 mods
Ian Fischer meant the same kind of modifications that are implemented by the famous Quake patches such as "Capture the Flag", "Battle of the Sexes", "Team Fortress", "Holy Wars" etc. Of course something like "Capture the Flag" will also be part of AoE2, but apart from that, there is a lot of room for suggestions.
I have posted two suggestions at the AoE2 wish list, after ideas from Quake patches: Holy Wars and Cannon Arena. Of course you actually had to play them to find out whether they are fun :)
Whisky signing off
Whiskey who had helped me out with the Dune 2000 page for a while has to leave now for national service the next coming day. I thank him for all the work he has done for that page; he really did an excellent job with his updates. Whisky lives in one of the countries where people do not have the privilege to choose whether they want to join the army or not. We should not forget that when we play war games, some countries are preparing for a real war :(
Scenario file formats
I am afraid that Ensemble does not want to share the specifications of the scenario file formats with us (which is understandable, because there is no other documentation than the code itself). So we have to find out ourselves :) I have posted a page with what I know so far. However, I have not found out anything non-trivial yet, so I need your help.
Play around with them in a hex editor, and try to find out what these bytes stand for!
Post everything that you know about the resource file formats in the Resource files discussion forum. Knowing the scenario file formats will enable us to write our own map generators and utilities; this will help (although it is not needed) the creation of larger mod packs with new sounds, new graphics and - hopefully - new units. I have revamped that discussion forum a bit; you are allowed to use HTML code in your messages, and there are direct links to all known sources of information.
AoE2 database updated
Check out the AoE2 database page for more information. The new suggestions include:
- dividing the map into shires that have to be defended (income can be gained if you hold them for a year)
- harmful weather and famines.
- voice communication with other players
- keeps as an integral entity in the game, upgrades either to stronghold or castles (with different benefits)
- non-siege units can no longer damage buildings with their weapons (but they can put them on fire)
I have also updated the known features section, too. Everything that is relevant about AoE2 can be found there (though I have not included all the units).
Interview with Chris Campbell
Ensemble studios has another interview with a member of their team: Chris Campbell, Quality Assurance Director, answers some frequently asked questions about playtesting:
"The two most asked questions I get are "When is the beta coming out?" and "Can I be on the beta team?" The answer is I'm not expecting any betas until at least the end of the summer and possibly later."
The organisation of the beta testing has not even started, so be patient :) Also consider that, if you want to test the beta version, it is not just about playing the game before other people do. You are expected to send useable (i. e. sufficiently detailed and structured) beta reports to ES (bug reports, missing features etc.).
New version of lagger's guide
I have finally rewritten the lagger's guide from my old Warcraft 2 page. I did it because it was startling to see how many people do not have a clue about it; they think that a fast computer makes them immune to lag. If you want to learn more about it, read that page. I hope it will correct some popular beliefs (there are still many people who think that turning up the speed will decrease the lag). You may be disappointed about the fact that you cannot do much about lag - usually it is not your system that causes it.
New ICQ?
EGN is a new ICQ-like service; you can download the client at www.entr.net. I have heard from it a few days ago and now downloaded it myself.
It is still in beta, so it may be a bit early to judge this product by its current appearance. The user interface is pretty unusual, it does not integrate itself into the current Windows desktop, but looks entirely different. You can select different skins to change the colors. The thing that may scare most people off is an advertisement frame that takes up 20% of the window. The ads are even animated, and as soon as you occasionally hit one, your browser is loaded to show the corresponding page. I found this very annoying.
The good things are that you will be able to launch many games directly from the client, and also an ftp program to transfer files. The user base is still very small (only 30,000 users compared to some 14 million users from ICQ), and it remains to be seen whether the fact that EGN will never sell themselves to AOL will be enough to make millions of users change their program.
New single player scenario
Out of some submitted scenarios, only one new single player scenario made it through my selection :)
I am looking for more good scenarios, particularly multiplayer.
CGI programmers wanted
If you know Perl and want to help me to port a scenario script to this page, please contact me. I do not have enough time to write more scripts right now, and in two weeks, I will be on vacation, so I cannot do much anymore till then.
ES updates their page
Go to ageofempires.net for the complete information from Ensemble Studios. They have updated their page and plan now weekly updates. I will only list the most important information here:
The AoE2 civilizations will include the Byzantines, Celts, English, Franks, Germans, Goths, Mongols, Persians, Samurai, Saracens, Sung, Turks, Vikings. This is very much centered on Europe, but since the Middle Age is about Knights and Castles, this is ok :)
In an interview, Mark Terrano from ES tells us about his life and his view of game design. More interviews will be posted next week.
Also have a look at their AoE2 units page to get a good preview of the sequel. I hope it will bring up new ideas for the AoE2 wishlist.
Some news about the expansion
It will be called "The Rise of Rome" and have the Roman, Macedonian, Carthaginian, and Palmyran civilizations. Camels will be new units, slowing down enemy cavalry charges, and "slingers", a low-cost counter to archers.
Weekly AoE2 themes at ES
Ensemble plans now to publish weekly some in-depth information about a particular feature in AoE. Their first page is about Farming. As expected, farms will be much larger, so units can traverse them. To weed up some micromanagement, farms will no longer stop producing food after a while (as in AoE).
New link
I have updated the links section.
Tribe sheets
Mr. Fixit has made .pdf tribe sheets where you have all information for one tribe (unit costs and statistics, available technologies and bonuses) on one single sheet. This makes twelve sheets to print. This is particularly useful if you are not familiar with AoE yet - you will only need one sheet for a game.
Weird new sound system
You are probably used to having a small speaker at each side of your monitor, or to your stereo producing the sound for your games. Now, you can have speakers inside your chair :)
I guess if you are playing Age of Empires with this one, catapults will actually hit you, too - get ready to rumble ;)
Gamesmania has more information about this chair, in case you want one.
I am one year older :)
Yes, today is my birthday - this means that there may be less updates tomorrow. Another year has passed, much has happened: I have played AoE a lot :) passed the first exams at the university (despite playtesting the AoE beta). I hope I will also pass this year. From this point of view, it is good that AoE2 is not going to be released soon, because having a new game makes learning almost impossible :)
ICGnu project
The ICQGnu page aims at producing a free, secure ICQ client and server. They also have a link to an existing open source ICQ program (if you like, you can add your own features and anti-spam filters there). This means if Mirabilis (which has been swallowed by AOL recently) starts spamming with ads or charging for their services, we can just switch over to the new program. Hopefully it is finished till then :)
So the ICQ list is still available for people who are not so fond of AOL ;) and people are welcome to help with the new program.
AoE2 in "best of E3 - the sequels"
Gamespot has a review of the E3 where they have chosen their favorite games - those which are still remembered after the E3. Surprise, surprise, Age of Empires 2 is in the list of the most promising sequels :)
They also have a recycled AoE2 preview there. What actually is surprising is that only two big sequels of strategy games are listed: Age of Empires 2 and Total Annihilation: Kingdoms. It seems like there will not be many strategy titles to be released in the near future - unlike last year, which saw dozens of new real time strategy games, most of which are now forgotten.
FAQ updated
I have updated the FAQ page. Please read this before posting a question at the message board - someone may have answered it already.
I have included new information and new questions. E. g.: city files (.cty) are no longer used in the game. They were used in old beta versions, but now you cannot customize the layout of a computer player's city anymore.
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September '97 - June 15 '98
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