Shame, that’s pretty much the number one graphical change I’d like to see.
Nice pun. I like to think they did it specifically for me – although I can’t be the only AoE2 player with an interest in English church architecture… right?!
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Thank you for the report TommoChocolate, I’m forwarding this information to the team and we’ll investigate whether that was an unintended change which was introduced alongside the graphical asset file optimization or not. 
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Lets hope they fix it before the 30th anniversary.
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Oh, wow, you think this might have been unintentional? I’d assumed it must have been deliberate. It’s as if someone in the art team realised Chichester Cathedral has a copper roof, and changed it for “accuracy” without realising that the copper roof is post-medieval.
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You sure you didn’t alter contrast settings?
First of all, it’s very nice that you reduced the game size for everybody.
It still surprised me though that you haven’t fixed the oversized Eastern European stable while you changed every single SLX game file to the SLD format:
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Having actually played the game properly with the new patch, I think actually the green saturation has increased across the board. It’s particularly noticeable on berry bushes and certain trees. Presumably the compression has messed up the palette somehow?
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Yeah, decently a palette problem!
I have some mods with Spring colors palette and after new update they doesn’t work.
Hope devs would fix it cause I miss my dark grey and blue color (that looks more like preDE blue Age2 color)
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Hi there!
This is technically by design - previously, due to the limited 256 color space of the old graphics format, some colors would get automatically reduced to accommodate the palette. The new graphics are full-color, and thus more closely match the way they actually were produced by the Art team. In general, you should expect to see higher color variety on every asset.
Although such sprites now look exactly as designed, we appreciate the feedback.
We are also aware of palette modding issues.
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So now instead of color reduction issues you have historical accuracy issues? 
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So this means all similar greens are affected. We now have a wider range of green shades?
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Unlike the original AoE2, each graphic in AoE2 DE before the latest update had its own 256-color palette rather than a shared one, so color reduction was different in each case. Some sprites may also have had less red or blue. In the original post’s specific example, the deficit color was green.
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What will be devs doing to restore the effects that palette modding used to give ?
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Would be good for a suitable modding tool to be provided to the modding community which can handle the SLD format files and also these palette issues and colour conversion matters.
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Interesting. I’m sure I’ll get used to it but it is inevitably a bit weird when the graphics change unannounced in a game I’ve been playing for almost three years.
This building already had several historical accuracy issues, but I’ve been restraining myself from commenting on those…
It does seem to have affected a lot of green things - I’ve noticed it mostly on trees and bushes. (But, that said, I haven’t had much chance to play since the update.)
Really hope that you will fix it soon)
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Better to use the opportunity to implement AoE3DE’s 100% customizable player colors, with one additional improvement: multiple built-in profiles to choose from. On the other hand, such built-in profiles can be added to AoE3DE.
Also, I’ve believed since the early previews of AoE2DE that the new blue player color is too deep into spectral (B of RGB) blue, and is very unpleasant to look at - dark on a bad display device, eye-searing on a good device with a wide gamut. The B value needs to be turned down a notch. You can compare it with AoE3, where the player blue also leans into spectral B, but the B value isn’t nearly as high.
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There is gamma correction available in settings.
could this change also be the reason for the color moods to not work anymore?
Color palette mods no longer work as SLD no longer uses palette files. You can modify the spritecolors.json file in the “dat” folder, which now sets the colors, but there is a known issue where this file can only be part of data mods at the moment.
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