Your game files

OpenAoK plays from your own, legally obtained copy of Age of Empires II: The Age of Kings: the original 1999 CD, version 1.0. It does not work with The Conquerors expansion or with the HD and Definitive editions, which use different data.

Copying the CD

Copy everything on the CD into a folder named original_game_1999 at the top of the OpenAoK folder (the repository on a desktop, the unzipped folder on Windows). From a disc or a mounted image on macOS, for example:

cp -R /Volumes/AOE2/. original_game_1999/

The folder then holds GAME/, SYSTEM/ and GOODIES/. That is all: the build unpacks and converts what it needs.

What is prepared from it

The first build, or the first start on Windows, prepares the game's data in assets/:

• the CD's archives and files, unpacked from its cabinets (with cabextract, or on Windows its own tools);
• the rule tables of the dat file and the strings of LANGUAGE.DLL, converted to JSON;
• the game's palette, the terrain blending masks and the default hotkeys.

At run time the engine reads the graphics, sounds, map scripts and AI scripts straight from the original archives. The game's data explains each file and how it is read.

For a phone, a tablet or the Switch, a script on the computer lays the prepared data out as one folder, about 350 MB, with a manifest of every file's checksum: see the guide for your platform.

Keep it to yourself

Everything taken from your copy stays on your machine and is ignored by git. Please do not share it, or the builds you make from it: a desktop build contains your game data. The Android APK, the iOS app and the Switch's OpenAoK.nro hold none of it; the data folders made for them do.

SafeDisc

The default hotkeys are read from the CD's GAME/EMPIRES2.EXE. On a CD protected by SafeDisc that file's code is encrypted, so they cannot be read: the build says so and goes on, and the game plays without hotkeys.