Sunday, February 28, 2016

Improvement Mod 6 Prototype

This is NOT the full, official version 6 release, this is a PROTOTYPE!

Alright, so, you're probably asking yourself "WTF IS THIS?". Well let me explain, this is the next logical step in the mod's development, and is what other big AoE3 mods have already done.

I'm talking about making the mod not affect the original games by having a different executable and different file paths. What this will end up doing is allowing you to play the modded game while also being able to go back and play the unmodded game at the same time, from the same installation.

It will also render the past three blog posts useless... Because it fixes all of those problems.

With Improvement Mod 6 you will be able to play AoE3, TWC and TAD without problems and without errors on ESO with people who don't have mods, while also being able to play the mod separately and it will still work on ESO as well, and you will have a uninstall option (FINALLY).

As you can tell by the title, this is a prototype, but it's not the first one. I already had people testing it and so far everything works perfectly.
All of this is more like a warning, because as soon as this will hit the patcher's server, it will break the game for everyone who had the old version.

To install Improvement Mod 6 and beyond you will need a clean reinstall of your game!
And after you install everything, including the mod, you will need to run the new exe, "age3m", in order to play the mod. To play the original games just start their own exes.

And that's all! I will give some time for this news to sink in for as many people as possible, because as soon as the new system hits the patcher, there's bound to be people who will have broken games without knowing why and blame me...

If you find any problems in the prototype be sure to let me know.
Thanks for playing!


DOWNLOAD -


Installation (on a fresh game)
- copy everything from inside the 'imp_mod_6_prototype' folder to your AoE3 directory, by default:
/Program Files/Microsoft Games/Age Of Empires III/
- if you plan on installing the mod over the Steam version, use this path (always inside the bin folder!):
/Steam/steamapps/common/Age of Empires 3/bin/

Make sure you run the original game first (to enter the cdkey and all that) and THEN run the mod's exe (this applies for both Steam and non Steam versions)!

Tuesday, February 2, 2016

AoE3 and TWC are fixed!

After 6 years, Age of Empires 3 vanilla and The WarChiefs expansion finally work once again with the Improvement Mod.

BUT, they do have problems. As I mentioned in the post bellow, the mod modifies files used by all three games and as such, it will force these files upon the older games as well.
This was the reason it broke the older games in the first place, but I didn't knew which files specifically did it.

Attention has been brought to me on this issue again recently and so I finally managed to fix it.
The bugs you will encounter will most likely be sound and UI bugs (do not use the minimized UI in AoE3 and TWC, you have been warned) and yes, I know it's bad that they are bugged but at least they work now.

Which I'm not sure if it's such a good thing either, at least previously it forced players to play Asian Dynasties, which is the proper way to play and the game for which this mod was designed.
Now I fear I'll get people telling me they've installed the mod and it bugged their game, because they will not be playing Asian Dynasties...

Oh gods, I can even see it... If this will happen a lot I swear I will break it again.

By running the patcher you will get all of them working, if it doesn't happen then do a clean reinstall of everything.

Outdated, check THIS!