sfttech / openage-data

Free (as in freedom) media files for openage.

openage data files

This repo contains the free assets for running openage. They will eventually replace the sprites and sounds used in Age of Empires I, Age of Empires II and Star Wars: Galactic Battlegrounds.

License

Data in this repository is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License or any later version.

Code in this repository is licensed under the GNU GPLv3 or any later version.

For further information and the author list, see copying.md.

Contributing

Guides for creation of assets can be found in our documentation.

As the files do not create them themselves, unfortunately you have to help out. grab your favorite program and start creating or improving media files!

Software suggestions:

2D Assets

• Krita: great out-of-the-box image manipulation and drawing tool
• GIMP: swiss army knife of image editing with loads of plugins and extensions available
• pillow: image manipulation for python scripts

3D Assets

• blender: 3D modeling, animating and rendering

Audio

• audacity: audio editing and recording
• Ardour: audio recording, editing and mixing
• LMMS: music and soundtrack production (midi only)

You should also check out our modding repository for custom tools and scripts.

Contact

If you have the desire to perform semi-human interaction, join our Matrix or IRC chatroom!

• #sfttech:matrix.org
• irc.freenode.net #sfttech

Do not hesitate to ping and insult us, we might not see your message otherwise.

Of course, create issues and pull requests for reporting or even changing things.

openage-data's Issues

human readable asset names and dummy assets

At the moment sound effects (and possibly other assets?) are named by numbers. As someone who wants to make sound effects this becomes really cumbersome to manage.

The ideal solution for me would be if each sound had a readable name. Such that data/sound/5032.opus was instead data/sound/castle.opus.

Additionally it would also be nice if there were dummy assets so one can see what needs to be done. There could be a todo extension like this data/sound/castle.todo and so when I add a sound I delete the zero byte todo file.

Graphics that might be useful to openage

Hi there!

Some time ago (~12 years) I myself wanted to create a game similar to Age of Empires.
I was able to create some nice graphics and mock-up engines in Turbo Pascal and JavaScript but the game never got anywhere and after all this time probably will never get anywhere.

Are you interested in some graphics files?

As you can see, the overall appearance of the graphics is kind of AoE-esque. They would therefore be quite a lot better than generic placeholders.

CC-BY-SA licensing would be fine with me. Let me know what you think.

Side note: I am also writing an engine clone, namely for Anno 1602:
You can find it here: https://github.com/roybaer/mdcii-engine and I describe it in more detail in the AnnoZone forum (German).

Tutorials

Having tutorials will lower the entry barrier for creators. We can use the modding guides at Age of Kings Heaven as an orientation but they are focussed on working around the limitations of the original game. Our tutorials should be utilizing the possibilities of the OpenAge engine.

Ideas for tutorials:

• Creating 3D models with blender (buildings, units, objects)
• Animating 3D models
• Capturing usable 2D sprites from 3D models
• Matching the colour palette of AoE 2
• Recording sounds from scratch
• Editing sounds, e.g. with Audacity (cutting, normalisation)

Templates

Templates would standardize some of the more repetitive steps in asset creation like setting up isometric camera angles, lighting and colour palettes. It will benefit everyone in the long run because modders can focus their time on the actual modelling.

Ideas for templates:

• 3D model in blender with complete setup of lighting, 8 cameras
• GIMP template with custom AoE2 colour palette

hey does anyone have the assets for openage and want to share it?

As the tittel says i want the assets of openage i dosen´t have the ORIGINAL game or relay want to buy it, you know becuse microsoft wink wink.

Naming scheme

We should encourage contributors to use a naming scheme for their files. That way, we can ensure that scripts which make use of the assets work the way they're supposed to and allows us to generate sprites in batches. The naming scheme could also be used for objects in blender.

For example, we could require a human readable scheme for elite skirmisher assets in this way:

• Filename: elite_skirmisher.blend
• Cameras: Camera000, Camera045, Camera090, ... , Camera315 (with Camera000 showing the front of the unit and then going around clockwise)

Doing this ensures that scripts will always find the right camera and sprites can be saved in a similar predictable format such as <blender-filename>_<camera-angle>.png (e.g. elite_skirmisher_090.png) which can be easily parsed by other scripts.

Evaluate possibility to integrate WFG's Rome at War artwork

Given that Rome at War, the older project by the 0 A.D. developers, is an Age of Empires II: The Conquerors Mod Pack, a cooperation and clarification of the licensing terms would make a lot of sense.
This mod pack could then provide most of the buildings, while pull request #19 would provide the terrain textures.

Licensing

We have to think about what license we will use for the data. Currently it is CC-BY-SA 4.0, but maybe we want something else, maybe even something like "and any later version of that license".