Age of Empires III Winter Wonderland map

Winter Wonderland is a custom map for Age of Empires III. As you might have guessed is a festive new map for the Christmas holidays!
This map is covered with snow, has red nosed deers, decorated trees, and piles of gifts. Nice of them to think of this.



You can download it from here (zip file of about 10KB): Winter Wonderland Map

After you download the zip file, simply extract the Christmas.xml and Christmas.xs to your: My Documents\My Games\Age of Empires 3\RM folder (usually it should be C:\Documents and Settings\\My Documents\My Games\Age of Empires 3\RM if you installed AOEIII on your C partition).

When you host a single or multiplayer game of Age of Empires 3, check the Custom Map box in order to be able to select the Winter Wonderland map. Note that when you play multiplayer games no experience is gained when you play on Custom Maps.

Have phun playing this. And happy hollidays!

Work on Age of Empires IV ...

I know, they've just released Age of Empires III and I'm already talking about Age of Empires IV. But the thing is that being a successful game it will have other sequels as well.



This is not the point. I wanted to say that Ensemble Studios, the company that develops Age of Empires III is hiring, so if you are a skilled artist you might have a chance to work for their next game.

If you're not an artist/programmer stay calm, they are not hiring any interns or testers (they state that "not at this time" so there is always the hope).

Positions they have opened:

• Producer


• Lead Artist


• 3D Artist


• User Interface Artist


• Game Animator


• Environment Artist


• Senior Server Programmer


• Senior Game Programmer


• Senior Programmers


• Programmers

They have an entire list of responsabilities/qualifications on their Job Openings page.

To candidate for any of the positions, you have to send a resume (with a portfolio) to studiosrecruiting@ensemblestudios.com . There are some guidelines for the portfolio:


Please submit your portfolio on CD or DVD. Submissions are kept on file for future consideration and will not be returned to you. Please do not send original artwork. We will accept a .ZIP file or website URL, however please consider that poor navigation or slow download will certainly affect your presentation. Please include a description of each file indicating software used, time to completion, general technical specifications, and some indication of the artistic direction or purpose for the work. If your demo reel contains any collaborative work provide a shot list indicating exactly what components of each examples are wholly your own. For technical art please include detailed descriptions of the technical aspects of your work, particularly if it is not immediately apparent in the samples. Diagrams or a step by step description of process may be more informative than the finished imagery.


What can I say...good luck to those who meet the requirements and may that you work on Age of Empires IV.