15 ms·
Modding Age of Empires II with a Sprite-Diffuser
- syntaxing 3y agoWow that was a treat. The author makes everything seems so easy. I fired up AUTOMATIC1111 recently and making good AI generated art (or whatever you want to call it) is way harder than it seems.
- MattRix 3y agoIt’s really not that hard to make good looking stuff with these AI image generators, you just need the right models. The reason you struggled is because the basic stable diffusion model creates really ugly stuff by default. Try using a model from civit.ai and you’ll get much better results… or for even easier results, just use midjourney where literally everything that comes out of it looks fantastic.
- lippihom 3y agoVery cool! The (re)growth of aoe2 has been a pleasure to watch.
- drekipus 3y agoThat is sick, I'd love to play some wackier AOE environments, or do "space station vs jumping castle" battles. Units would be hard because there's a sprite for each direction which you'll have to keep consistent, but it would be great to see if it's possible to do, maybe as a sprite sheet
- Dalewyn 3y agoFunny you mention space stations, because the Genie engine that powers the Age of Empires line of games was also used for Star Wars: Galactic Battlegrounds. Further reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genie_Engine#Games_using_the_Genie_Engine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genie_Engine#Games_using_the_G...
- alternatetwo 3y agoAnd even more interesting, before Age of Empires was Age of Empires, but was called "Tribe", there used to be a space age version developed alongside called "Stratos". Here are some demo/concept screenshots: http://aoe.heavengames.com/cgi-bin/forums/display.cgi?action=ct&f=1,6514,50,all http://aoe.heavengames.com/cgi-bin/forums/display.cgi?action... I swear, there used to be more, but I keep misplacing them. Maybe they are in an album on there which I can't find. The concept art was by Ralph McQuarrie, who notably did the concept art for Star Wars. A very, very old exe version called "ptribe" still has some STRATOS function names, and a cmdline argument seeminly specifying which game is being started.
- alternatetwo 3y agoI am just blind. They were linked in that post all along: http://aoe.heavengames.com/aoegallery/?occur=1&lang=en&cover=0&album=75&photo=1251 http://aoe.heavengames.com/aoegallery/?occur=1&lang=en&cover...
- 9dev 3y agoI didn’t know that! Just googled and was slightly disappointed - that looks just like AoE with the sprites swapped out, down to the same trees. Well. Still interesting to know this happened!
- hn92726819 3y agoI've played this game and never played aoe2. As I understand it, aoe2 has no aircraft while swgb has classic star wars ships (x wing, y wing, tie fighter, etc). If you like star wars and aoe2, I'd recommend it. Goes on sale for like 2 bucks on gog
- tekni5 3y agoKind of tried something similar in the game called Rust: https://youtu.be/j674nbG4_t8 https://youtu.be/j674nbG4_t8 This is a style transfer via SD, Controlnet and EbSynth.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- omneity 3y agoBig AoE fan here. The idea is brilliant and I love the execution. I wish the author did not put every screenshot in a gif, I'd have preferred to be able to look at the results in a less stressful way. 2 seconds to switch to another screenshot, that's way too fast! On a side note, it would be interesting to try to apply the same technique to units and effects (explosions, fire, etc). I didn't see a mention of it by the author so I wonder if there's a technical limitation here that wasn't mentioned.
- bombcar 3y agoI have a stupid dirty trick for this (works in Safari) - click and start dragging the image, but don't let go. It's like you drag a particular "frame" out and can look at it.
- keyle 3y ago20 years on a mac and I'm still learning stuff, thank you!
- oblak 3y agoJust FYI: that old trick is definitely not a mac or Safari thing
- iforgotpassword 3y agoI think Opera was the first to do that.
- fbdab103 3y agoAm I imagining things or once-upon-a-time did Firefox give you the ability to advance GIFs frame by frame?
- rzzzt 3y agoPressing Esc did stop the animation, but I'm not sure you could step over it.
- b1n 3y agoThis is great, can't wait unti this is taken to the next level... (they touch on this at the end of the article) - An RTS without units or buildings by default. - The players enter prompts and creates any unit they can imagine.
- totetsu 3y agoI was wondering about how this could affect gameplay. Like disguising your buildings by looking like other buildings.. That example of all the buildings being made of books. How can I tell the difference between a barracks and an archery range.. or just a patch of empty grass? I used to play a text based MUD that had a high level spell that let you create illusion spells that just output text of your choosing onto other players screens. It was often used to just verbatim send the You Died, text and ruin peoples day for a moment.
- chii 3y agoit'd be interesting to make a game where the units aren't hardcoded either - and to play against someone, you'd have to "figure out" what their units did and what weakness it would have (i imagine it would work by a point system, where for example, if you put more into health, their attack would be weaker etc).
- totetsu 3y agoSMAC let you do this. The components all had costs, and the reactor upgrades increased their power, and IIRC reduced the costs. So as you advanced you picked and chose what frames, reactors, components, armor you want. It let you do things like Colony pods with orbital insertion, or submarine probe teams. Very fun.
- rootw0rm 3y agoi used to do the same thing, but with simple say/tell/shout commands + terminal control codes to move cursor/overwrite text/etc. was lots of fun =) edit - worked with zMUD anyways
- 3y ago
- aww_dang 3y agoI've been looking for something like this for 4 directional sprites with interchangeable equipment.
- kayson 3y agoThis is a game that came out in 1999! More than 20 years later there have been two remakes, there's still a huge and healthy community and a thriving pro scene. And now someone is using relatively cutting edge image AI to mod the sprites. It's crazy to me how some of these old games have such staying power (Super Smash Bros Melee is another that comes to mind).
- biohax2015 3y agoTetris on the NES still has massive tournaments. It’s pretty interesting to watch these super-young games (relative to chess, tennis, etc.) mature and develop as genuine fields of competition.
- hot_gril 3y agoThe even crazier thing is card or board games that are still alive and modernized. Some games are timeless.
- eru 3y agoMany of the best board games are less than twenty years old. Cardboard based entertainment has made huge strides recently. By and large, good boardgames are not so much timeless as 'fairly new' instead. There have been a few good games earlier, but it's really instructive to have a look at the ranked list of boardgames at https://boardgamegeek.com/browse/boardgame https://boardgamegeek.com/browse/boardgame and check the publication dates.
- fbdab103 3y agoOne problem I have with the rankings here is they seem really prone to grade inflation and band-wagoning. Even more-so when the game is expensive.
- eru 3y agoYes. And they are also just aggregates of what people think. They aren't God given absolute quality judgements. Yet, even with all the caveats, it's still remarkable how much better boardgames have gotten.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- netsharc 3y agoThe images of ruins at the end are interesting. Imagine an option that after winning the game you can fast-forward time and watch your glorious civilization decay into ruins and nothingness.
- lachstar-x 3y agoOr you play the same map again and have to start in a different spot, and you have the ruins of your last game on the map
- trojanalert 3y agoSome games are timeless classics, and to use Stable Diffusion to do this is incredible. Looks absolutely stunning. And yes, can we please have the 2 sec lag removed so we can inspect and actually see what Generative AI was able to output
- s0ulphire 3y agoLove it! The older kids in the fam regularly revisit this game to recreate the lan battles of old, would love adding these to shake things up a bit :) post up a paypal donation link if you'd like some $$ for your efforts!
- haolez 3y agoI'd love to do that to create fighting games character sprites. Combined with Mugen, it would make for a very fun experience and the LLM could help on adding attacks and gameplay logic. Where should I start to make this happen? Stable Diffusion without customization is really bad at creating character sprites.
- aledalgrande 3y agoThis is absolutely epic! Love AoE and also the idea! Stable diffusion is such a creativity enabler. Hope we will see more of this! Carmageddon next?!
- neom 3y agoWaiting for someone to get all generative AI'esq with Myst. That will be a fun day.
- trh0awayman 3y agoThe first example looks pretty unique for an art style. I'd love to see this done on the fly, so that each building is unique during game play. Also, I think the buildings would look better if you give it some context of the ground surrounding the buildings. This certainly solves a lot of issues for tile-based games where you have to handle at least 3 cases in both graphics + programming (in a 2d, single-layer tile game, you need corner pieces, middle pieces, and edge pieces). Think two houses built next to each other in AoE - now they could mesh and form a completely new style of row house, without any effort
- yreg 3y agoUsing ControlNet with a depth map is very useful here, since it makes the modded building similar to the original exactly in the way the users identify it. It reminds me of skins in a game like Overwatch – it's the shape that's the most important to make you able to identify a hero in split second, even if it's wearing a skin you have never seen before.
- instakill 3y agoJust here to comment that AOE2 is probably the best game ever made.
- dcist 3y agoI agree with this comment. I wish there was an effort to improve the performance and fundamental capabilities of AOE2 specifically (bigger maps, more varied terrain, higher pop count, ability of the game engine to use multi-core processors, etc.). AOE2 really did almost everything right and it's a timeless classic.
- Simon321 3y agoI actually did this before the 7th of may: https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/13axnoa/trained_a_model_to_output_age_of_empires_style/ https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/13axnoa/tr... Maybe OP was inspired? Seems like a big coincidence otherwise. Just wish he would've credited me. Happy to see other people experimenting with this also though. It will be great for indie game development.
- throwaway675309 3y agoIt is possible they came up with the concept completely independently, though I would agree it does seem rather unlikely. It would've been the classy move to give you a shout out if they were inspired by your project. There was a post on hacker news earlier about how people seem to have zero ethical quandaries around plagiarizing and using chat GPT to write their essays for exams...
- pluijzer 3y agoI get an Invalid Certificate error when trying to visit the link. The title seems enticing though.
- moffkalast 3y agoSeems like it's a valid cert from GoDaddy, did you block them as a root auth or something?
- pluijzer 3y agoThanks. It was a misconfiguration of my company laptop's VPN.
- dazhbog 3y agoAoE space civilization with a dash of neon lights... Sign me up!
- lvl102 3y agoDo Simcity 4 next. Heck you can train it on actual buildings off of Google Maps or others like it.
- Hitton 3y agoI wonder what is the legal aspect of this. Whether it would be possible to use this to create alternative assets for a game which would be unencumbered by copyright, for instance for Quake 3 where code is open source but assets are proprietary.
- bombcar 3y agoI'm not sure about this method in particular, but there are groups who push on that, I know you can find Doom with all the copyrighted assets replaced. It's surprisingly hard to make it look good when that is done, art direction is hard.
- j7ake 3y agoA novel twist to a timeless classic! Bravo
- dave_sullivan 3y agoReally good post and great example of how someone can incorporate these tools into their work. Maybe there will be a new resurgence of proc gen games that finally manage to get past the same-ness problem with more diverse, interesting generated environments.
- triggerity 3y agoIt should not take too long for us to use something like this to reupscale low poly game footage from YouTube or old archives (like D2 / Diablo 2 remastered) and style transfer to enjoy it in the style we prefer. Great that someone did what I wanted to try and never tried it :)
- xwdv 3y agoI’ve thought of this not for AoE, but for Sim City 4. Currently midjourney can produce art for buildings that could almost be used directly in game, but stuff like shading and lighting needs to be tweaked.
- butz 3y agoLooking at that one with columns gives me an idea: how about M.C. Escher based buildings sprite pack?
- Imnimo 3y agoI remember back in the early 90s there was an expansion for SimCity 2000 called the Urban Renewal Kit, which let you draw your own building sprites to replace the ones in the base game. It also came with a pre-made pack of futuristic buildings. I was too artistically challenged to ever really make my own pixel art buildings - the best I could achieve was drawing little six-pixel cars driving up the spiral roof and into the reactor of the alternate-art nuclear power plant. It would've been great to be able to give style prompts and have the software churn out appropriate sprites for each building type.