Friend - Foe colors / THE TUTORIAL

Hello there friends !
Here is a little tutorial on how you can change the " Friend - Foe " colors for your game.

What you need:

  1. The Game
  2. The Resource Manager → [v.0.4] Resource Manager - Viewing, comparing, creating and extracting files from Age of Empires III .BAR archive - #109 by DrMaxy4142

What you need to do:

  1. Run the Resource manager you have downloaded
  2. Click on " FILE → OPEN "
    2.1 Search for the game installation → C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\AoE3DE\Game\Data
    2.2 Click on "Data.bar " and open it.
  3. Now you have opened the Data.bar file, and can use the Searchfile section in the lower corner of the programm, search for : " Playercolor " you will find a file named " Playercolors.xml.xmb "
    3.1 Select the file and click on " Extract → Selected "
    3.2 Make sure you select the following options : " Auto decompress compressed Files " and " Auto convert .XMB to XML "

Now you can open the Playercolors.xml file with any normal text editing programm, Wordpad for example.

Once you have opened it, you will find a few lines of code. Make sure you check out the bottom lines :smiley:

  <friendorfoeself color1="75 75 230" color2="75 75 230" color3="75 75 230" minimap="0 0 255">
  </friendorfoeself>
  <friendorfoeally color1="215 215 30" color2="215 215 30" color3="215 215 30" minimap="255 255 0">
  </friendorfoeally>
  <friendorfoeenemy color1="230 40 40" color2="230 40 40" color3="230 40 40" minimap="255 0 0">
  </friendorfoeenemy>

As the name of these rows say
Nr1. Friend or foe SELF
Nr2: Friend or foe ALLY
Nr3. Friend or foe ENEMY

While checking the ingame options and the code you will notice there is color 1 2 and 3 , while also minimap
Color 1 Suggests the color itself
Color 2 Suggests the strengh of the color
Color 3 is the Visibility of the color
Minimap is the color that is shown on the minimap

I suggest you to use a RGB color palet for this → RGB Color Codes Chart 🎨

Once you have changed the colors safe the file, and go back to the Resource Manager.

Now you click on " Convert → XML → To XMB (DE) " and select your edited file.

Once it has been converted, move to your games folder → C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\AoE3DE
Create a new folder named " data " ( In the same folder where the exe is located !

Put your " Playercolors.xml.xmb " file in it, and start your game.

Gratulations ! You have succesfully changed your Friend Ally Foe colors !

5 Likes

Hey man I seem to have a problem as I did all these steps it says

do you know what I did wrong?

Hay,check the extraction path, looks like it tries to extract to the bar file


Indeed also thought that something is wrong with that, however it doesn’t allow me to just select the file before the bar file. Sorry man to disturb you, do you have any Idea what I should do different? :frowning:

At the same time If I try “extract” → “from list of paths” it doesn’t even show it

I’m actually unsure what’s happening there, but I can send you the file later :slight_smile:

Thanks mate for your help, I’ll ask some friends of mine. Maybe they know something that we don’t :confused:

1 Like

Hay, sorry for the late reply, here is the file:

Ah thanks bro, however I fixed my problem. My friends did really know what I did wrong so ye I have my colour changed now.

1 Like