The Advanced Genie Editor is an excellent software to inspect and modify the core game files of games that use the Genie format – that includes Age of Empires II in particular. It is written in C++ and licensed under an open source license¹, which makes the whole thing twice as nice (the open source part, not the fact that it is written in C++).

While the Advanced Genie Editor is just available for download as a Windows executable, it can also be compiled and run on Linux systems.

As I happen to play my Age of Empires II on my Linux as well (using Wine/PlayOnLinux), this is what I desire, to be able to look up stuff easily when developing other Age of Empires II related tools.

Unfortunately, being rather inexperienced with the whole C++ build chain, I never really got it to compile. Which sucked, because I would either have to reboot into Windows or use my windows laptop next to my main PC to run the precompiled windows version. This also meant no copy-pasting.

But after some more hours of trial and error, I finally got it to work!

HowTo

On a freshly installed Ubuntu 18.04, run the following commands:

sudo apt install git build-essential cmake libwxgtk3.0-dev libboost-all-dev libsfml-dev
git clone https://github.com/Tapsa/AGE.git
cd AGE
mkdir extern
cd extern
git clone https://github.com/Tapsa/genieutils.git
git clone https://github.com/Tapsa/pcrio.git
cd ..
cp "Misc Files"/zlib.cpp extern/genieutils
cp /usr/share/SFML/cmake/Modules/FindSFML.cmake cmake/
mkdir build
cd build
cmake .. -DEXTERN_DIR=extern
make

The make step will take some time.

Finally, you will have an AdvancedGenieEditor3 executable in AGE/build/! Happy modding.

(You cannot change the (absolute) location of the AGE/build/extern/genieutils/libgenieutils.so library though. Otherwise, the program will not work anymore, as it will be unable to locate the library.)