I think everyone understands that DE will break most of current projects and utilits. One of the utilities that will not work in DE is
Archive Viewer from
AOE3ed to view .bar files and its contents.
Short desciption of Arhive Viewer:
How and for what do I use Archive Viewer?
You'll go to File and then Open. In the screen that pops up, go to the map where you've installed Age of Empires III and go into a map like Art or Data to select a .bar file. A huge list of different files will show. To make searching for a specific file easier a search function has been added. Just type in the box a the bottom a part or the whole name of the file you're looking for and only the files that include your search are showed. You can also preview some files by clicking on View/Preview, this will help you determine if you've selected the file you're looking for. When you've selected the file you're looking for go to Extract/Selected and the file will to taken out off the .bar file so you can convert and edit it.
So as a Beta participant I have access to beta game files. I reworked Archive Viewer program and now it works even for AoE3: DE - it has all features(viewing .bar files, exctracting from .bar, preview xmb files) from the old version except for the preview of some DDT formats. I used decompression algorithm from ModHQ, but it doesn't work properly for DXT3 and DXT5 formats.
So if anyone has knowledge about DXT3 and DXT5 decompression and can explain what's wrong with my code, I'll be very grateful. Please, send DM in Discord (XaKOps#1244) if you interested in this work.
I also have source code of AOE3ed(C++), AOMed(Perl) and DDT Photoshop plugin(C++) but they use specific libs to decompress DDT image.