Let's imagine you are lurking in the Blacksmith, and you stumble upon this badass knight. You find it so cool you desperately want to have it, you press the download button and... you get files you have no idea what to do with. It's sad isn't it ? Well get ready for I am here to explain you how to add these graphics and all the graphics you will ever want to your game.



Add graphics to the game

Contents-
Section 1 – Preparation
Section 2 – Adding SLP to DRS
Section 3 – Editing the data


Section 1 – Preparation

Now I will assume you have read Sarn's beautiful guide on creating new units so you are a bit familiar with Advanced Genie Editor (AGE).

You will need:
AGE3 (Available here)
Turtle Pack (Available here)

Now we're going to familiarize withe type of files we will encounter :
-SLP files : they contain graphics of a certain animation (attacking, standing, walking, dying, decaying) for a unit.
-DRS files : they are files that contain all the SLPs of the game
-Data files : pretty self explanatory, they contain all the units stats and game data.

First of all things, BACKUP YOUR FILES ! I can't stress enough how important this is, if you follow the steps carefully nothing should go wrong but you don't wanna take any risks. The files you want to backup are found in a different folder depending on your game version :

- AoC : Age of Empires 2\DATA

- AoFE (mod) : Age of Empires 2\Games\Forgotten Empires\Data

- AoK:HD : Steam\steamapps\common\Age2HD\resources\_common

- AoF/AoAK : Steam\steamapps\common\Age2HD\resources\_common




Section 2 – Adding SLP to DRS

Ok so you have downloaded the Indian knight, what to do with the files you have ?

Note : AoK:HD doesn't use DRS files, you have to directly put the slps in the gamedata_x1 or gamedata_x2 folder and renaming your slp the last number there is +1

Open your gamedata_x1_p1 file using Turtle Pack, and click on the little green cross to add a file, and select the five SLP you have downloaded ("attack" "decay" "die" "stand" "walk"). In the window that pops up choose "slp".



You should get something like this :



Now you can just save (but don't quit Turtle Pack, you will still need it.


Section 3 – Editing the data

You're not done yet, if you launch the game now you will see that nothing has changed. There are still a few things to do.

Now open AGE3, you'll have a large window and a smaller pop-up window in front of it. In order for AGE to edit your data files, it needs to know where they are. At the top of the window, you'll see a number of buttons. If you installed your copy of AoK in the default location (C:\Program Files\Microsoft Games\Age of Empires II), then you just need to click the “TC Defaults” button. If you installed it somewhere else, you'll need to change the path in the boxes to go to your alternate installation location. Once you've finished this, just click "Ok".

When I'm editing the data, my motto is : never create from scratch, always copy something that already exists and modify it so you have what you wanted. In this case, we want a knight type of unit, so we are going to look at the knight unit, use its graphics as a template to add ours.

Go in the Unit tab and in the search box, type "knight", and select knight in the list below. It is the knight unit from the game, and we want to take a look at his graphics : you will notice that his graphics are all called "KNGHT_..."



Now go to the Graphics tab, and in the search box type "knght". On the list below select the graphics called "KNGHT_AN", "KNGHT_DN", "KNGHT_FN", "KNGHT_SN" and "KNGHT_WN" and press the copy button.



Now delete what you have in the search box and click on the add button five times. You will see that you have created five graphics called "New Graphic". Select them and click on "paste".



You will see this :



Now you will want to rename your graphics for the sake of clarity :
Just select the one called "KNGHT_AN" and in the box at the top called "Name", replace the "KNGHT" part by whatever you want, let's say "INDIAN". Do it for all the five graphics.

Now you don't want these graphics to be the exact replica of the knight's right ? In the box called "SLP" of your "INDIAN_AN" graphic, replace the number it's there by the number the number of the attack graphic of the indian knight in the DRS. If you have done it right, the second box of AGE should now display the attck graphic of the indian knight.



There is one thing you must check : the frame number. One SLP contain the frames for one action (attack, stand, walk, die, decay) for five rotations : South, South-West, West, North-West, and North for units (ships have more rotations). You want to make sure that the number frame per angle in AGE is correct. In Turtle Pack, there is a little number under the graphics preview, 50 in this case. It is the total number of frame of the SLP. As it has 5 rotations, it makes 10 frames per rotation : it matches what's in the box in AGE so we are good to go. If it was'nt the case then you would juste have to put the correct number of frames per angle in the box.



Now just do the same for the other graphics.

We're almost done, go back to the unit tab, create a new unit copying the knight (don't forget its dead unit, ID 111 FYI).

Make sure you have the "including graphics" box checked ! (you'll notice that I forgot to check it when I took those screenshots so I had to start again )

Change its name to Indian knight, and change its standing graphics to the one you have created : INDIAN_FN (the second window should now display the indian knight standing graphics).



Same goes for the others graphics, including the standing graphics of the dead unit you have copied that should be changed to "INDIAN_SN".
In your Indian knight unit, scroll down until you find a box called "dead unit", it should display "111", change it to your newly created dead unit.

You can now change your new unit's stats as you desire, save and launch the game when you are ready. You will see that you can place your unit in the scenario editor, with its badass graphics !



Now you can head over Felix's article to make your unit trainable !

[This message has been edited by TriRem (edited 08-09-2016 @ 11:41 AM).]