Thursday, December 6, 2012

Texture Bug Fix-ish!

Along with the height adjusting camera, a possible fix for the terrorizing "texture bug", which plagues all AoE3 mods, has been released. After some tests did by my self and my friend Martin it turns out it really fixes the problem, which is amazing!

For those who don't know what I'm talking about let me explain.
The process of "creating a new unit" in AoE3 is composed mostly by texturing, since you don't actually create a new model, just re-texture existing models and mix up different animations and accessories.
This is how all mods do it. Lately, the possibility of creating and importing new buildings and animations from other games appeared, but units are still tricky.

You would wonder why is AoE3 modding so restrictive or hard compared to other games. I don't think anyone really knows, but probably the developers didn't knew or didn't want anyone to mod it so much, thus they didn't released any official modding tools or info...
Who knows...

So, the bug makes the game to basically refuse new textures in order to keep the game running smoothly. This probably was a big problem back in 2004 when the game was made, but now we're in 2012...
This bug, of course, results in new textures reverting back to the model's default texture in the middle of the game... Most of you have probably seen it. All of you had it even if you didn't notice. No matter how powerful your PC is, it will happen.

Fixing this bug raised the system requirements a bit, but it's nothing huge, don't worry.
I played AoE3 on a 64mb video card, so I really don't worry about it, still, I wanted to let everyone know.

What I did was to enable an existing engine code which keeps new textures no matter what.
This will basically make everything so much better and awesome, since now we can have more "new units" and have more variation between cultures and civilizations without the fear that it will all go to hell while playing...

Thank you for your time and enjoy!


PS: And why the hell don't you people tell me the zip download is incorrect, it's a zip with the installer in it...
It should be like on ModDB, a zip with the mod's files for manual installation...
I got zips mixed up, that one was for AoE3 Heaven... Gonna fix it...