Hey!
By looking at Spleen's speedruns for the missions "Cerberus" and "Rampage", i notice that the original version of the missions are different from the extended edition ones. For cerberus, the titan gets close to the door later in the original version (meaning we can get it out without having to break the wall) and in Rampage the army doesn't follow the titan, meaning we can easily drag him toward our troops without dragging the whole army.
But thing is I like the extended edition, it's just nicer and more convinient in my opinion. So I unpacked the original missions using the Dragon UnPACKer and swapped the EE versions with those; so I can play original missions on EE.
Is it consider cheating ? It does give me an advantage over EE players, but not over the original version players. I think it shouldn't be much of a problem but I prefer asking.
For now the only differences I've found between the two versions is the titan pathfinding in these two missions :
It's also not an RNG thing, it has the exact same behaviour every time. I don't know what causes the difference, but there's definitely one.
I've imported the original scenario to EE to compare them, and I'm not seeing a difference in triggers.
For Cerberus, I've noticed that, when you skip the cutscene, the position of the titan on EE is slightly different from the one on original, probably due to some slightly bugged pathing during the cutscene of the EE version. In the original version he walks straight to the pyramid, while on EE he walks slightly to the right and adjusts at the end, so that he ends up slightly further south. This causes him to attack the bottom obelisk first rather than the top one, which then makes him go north.
For Rampage, the enemies' positions change a lot between skipping the cutscene and letting it play out. It seems that if you skip the cutscene at the start, then the positions the titan and army warp to are different between EE and original. As far as i know, what happens when cutscenes are skipped is not handled by triggers, so I don't know where to look for that info; it does indeed seem that the original and EE scenarios are different in that. There may be more scenarios where the different versions have significant differences.
That said, I am neutral on whether it should be allowed to swap scenarios between original and EE; on one hand you're modifying game files, but on the other hand both versions are official dev-made and part of the campaign.
My first impression is that the files shouldn't really be messed with since that kinda messes with the integrity of game versions, and that each version with their own quirks should just be taken as they are, since that's just how it is. It may be inconvenient not to play on EE, but other speedgames go through inconveniences if it's faster without modifying game files as well.
That being said, I'm not the king of AoM or anything (hell, I don't even run it) so if more are in favor than against then sure thing
Very late to the discussion, but I would second Mhmd_FVC's comments that we shouldn't be exchanging files between the two versions. It seems like the original version of the game is often faster to run. The leaderboards nevertheless keep track of which version is played, so there's no harm in keeping the two separated. Note that AoM:EE still gets patched every now and then, which makes things much trickier.
