Full Map Screenshots

[simonsan]

I think it could be a nice addition to the toolset of some Map Scripters if they would have a compatible tool at hand to create "screenshots" for map previews for AoE2DE. Could be a nice use case for the beginning. 👍

[puzzlepaint]

The full-map-screenshot function itself should be quite easy to implement, I think.

However, for the suggested use-case, there are at least two other things missing which may take much more effort:

• Using map scripts from the original game. If anyone knows about any existing work on this, this would be interesting to know.
• Implementing different terrain types with proper blending between them.

[goto-bus-stop]

For the purpose of creating screenshots for map previews, it would be enough to be able to read scenario files—map scripters could generate scenario files in Definitive Edition and load them in FreeAge to take a full map screenshot. I think the scenario editor can be quite buggy in DE but I've wanted to make a tool that can extract scenario files from rec games using genie-rs for a while, that's quite straightforward. Then folks could start a game with their RMS, extract the scenario from the rec, and load that into FreeAge 😅

Actual RMS support is quite an undertaking and it's worth considering if you want to be maximally compatible or just roughly approach what map scripts do in AoE. I've done a lot of reverse engineering on the map generator in 1.0c and I don't really think its implementation is high quality (that said, I'm not sure what a great implementation would look like!).