June's Update

Wow May is gone already, and time has been flying by for all of us here at Microsoft Studios, Skybox Labs, and Forgotten Empires. We have a massive overhaul to Age of Empires II HD coming up here in June, so I will be making several posts to cover this stuff in detail over the next week. For those who are more of the TLDR crowd though, let’s do a summary of key takeaways. There are two main points of pain here as we go through this update, one around file size downloads, the other around updating to the new mod SDK and the effect on the workshop. I think most people will find the changes worth it at the end of the day.Discussion Thread Here This underlying work was necessary for several of the other game features, both the improved mod management system, as well as the multiplayer lobby. While on its own this item isn’t exactly user facing, it does require us to change how the depots are configured in Steam. Because of those changes, our June patch will require you to re-download a significant amount of data (estimating about 2-3GB right now). Unfortunately we can’t do a pre-load for the update.Localization and string tables are being improved and condensed. We’re seeing a few bugs get resolved from this around localization as well. Nothing super fancy.Most of these are around single player crashes in campaigns, but there are numerous bugfixes to existing and newer features across the board.I’ve got a lot to cover in this below for the full brief, but at the most basic level this involves having a single lobby screen regardless of what content you own / wish to play / etc. In our new lobby browser you’ll be able to see if a game has been hosted with expansion content or if it is the base game.We want people to check out all of the new awesome civs in the AoF expansion, so we’re going to let players who don’t have the expansion get a taste of the new civs. If a vanilla only player joins an expansion game, they will be able to choose from a rotating pool of civilizations. Initially this will be a couple of base civs, plus one civilization from the expansion to try. There are a ton of other rules and conditions here to cover, but we’re hoping to see a lot of new multiplayer games running with the AoF content!Two years ago when AOE II HD was released the steam workshop SDK from valve was far more limited than today’s offering. While some features have been fairly easy to add, the June update will see a full overhaul to the latest Steam SDK (May 2015). Tired of verifying files to remove a mod? Publishing a mod and having trouble fitting all of your files? All of these will be solved!But there’s a downside here, in order to accomplish both this and the Mod Manager, it means that old mods will no longer function. Thankfully we’ll be making it fairly easy to migrate to the new mod system, and if the author updates their mod then you’ll be good to go.We’re also unbundling a few packages even further to help modders make visual changes to just individual units without needing to replace an entire container.Which brings us to the last major update here, which is the introduction of a mod management system within AOE II HD. Previously mods would get unpacked and overwrite your existing file content, a messy solution that had all sorts of priority issues. The new manager will allow you to view in game which files you are subscribed to, choose the order in which they load in to avoid conflict issues, and much more. For mod authors, you will be able to take an existing mod you created and upgrade it to the new mod system. There are a few caveats to this, however in most cases you should be set.The workshop also has a set of new tags to help showcase which items are new mods vs older style mods. Mod creators, we have a public beta branch available to you in order to get a head start on upgrading your mods to the new system. Please note some of the content ,like multiplayer, is not currently enabled. If you update your mod now, current owners will not see any negative side effects since their core game files are already overwritten. New subscribers would have to be on the new data structure for the mod to work, however that should only be an issue for a rather short time.We’ve got a ton of detail on that branch already: http://steamcommunity.com/workshop/discussions/-1/620713633854642997/?appid=221380 Huge thanks to our dedicated community members who have been helping us out with both private and public betas. We’re looking forward to making AOE II HD even better before our new expansion is available later this year!