This article has been approved and can also be read at the University. - Leif Ericson


The windows7/Vista "Toxic grass" fix for Age of conquerors.


Well, if you're reading this you have the problem that pretty much everyone AOC fan has the moment they start up that new computer. Your grass and trees have turned into a plethora of reds, purples, and pinks. The ocean looks like something from Halo has imploded inside it, causing it to take on a rather unwholesome appearance similar to what you experience on the land. Simply put, your colors have inverted and your screen is seizure inducing.

Fortunately this is very easy to fix so you won't have to stick with toxic grass and polluted water forever. It is important to note that the major Programs that allow you to play AOC online,(Voobly, and Gameranger) already have a built in fix; but if you want to watch recorded games or if you want to play a LAN game, you'll have to fix the colors yourself.

Fix one: Ending Explorer.
This is the most basic way to fix the colors in AOC, that requires no downloading or installing of any kind.

The first step is to boot up the game to the main menu. Once the game is up alt tab back to your desktop.

Once you're back at your desktop, you need to Ctrl,alt,Del and bring up your task manager. Once it's up, switch over to processes.

Once there scroll down until you find the process titled "Explorer .exe". Highlight it and then click end process.

All your task bars and icons will disappear leaving nothing but the task manager box up. Alt tab back into your game and enjoy your fixed colors.

Once you're done and you exit the game just go over to applications bar and click the new task box. In the text box, type in explorer and hit enter. Your desktop will come back fully restored.

Fix two: The Lord Basse fix.
This is another easy way to fix the problem. Lord Basse has a Batch file that does the above automatically for you. The only inconvenience with the batch file is that you must boot the game from that file. Installing instructions are included with the download that can be found here.


If you want to make your own batch file, you can also make a batch file of your own with the following lines and place it in the same location as your Age Of Empires 2 executable.

taskkill /F /IM Explorer.exe
age2_x1.exe
Start explorer.exe

As you can see, all it does is end explorer for you and boot it back up when you exit the game.

Fix three: Windows classic mode. Make your own theme.
This is, in my opinion, the best of all the fixes because it allows you to freely alt tab out of the game at any time and do pretty much anything on your computer. It's especially handy if you're watching a recorded game and you want to leave your email, or your Facebook, or your MSN up.


First right click on your desktop and bring up the "personalization screen". Then switch over to "windows classic mode" that I've highlighted in the above screen shot.


Once in windows classic right click again and bring up your screen resolution page. Just leave that window up as in the above screenshot and then boot the game up. Your colors should be fixed.
Note: I've only tested this with Windows7 and it worked on multiple computers. I don't have Vista so I wasn't able to test it out on it. It should work though.

To make this simpler, save windows classic at the top as AOE theme to make it faster to set up. Then all you have to do is bring up the screen resolution page.

So there you have three ways to fix your problem. There are doubtless other fixes but these are the three that I think work the best with as little downloading as possible. I hope you enjoyed the article, thanks for reading.

-Coldviper

[This message has been edited by Leif Ericson (edited 01-30-2012 @ 03:31 AM).]