The Populous Vault

Introduction

On this page users can expect to find information reguarding Populous Editing. Populous Editing refers to editing the attributes of Populous: The Beginning. Some examples of editing the games would be your typical map-editing whlike some of the less comonly understood editable game properties could consist of items such as, but not limiited to, graphic enhancement, scripting, etc. If you are looking for information on the best programs to use to edit a certain aspect of the game, then you have come to the right spot.

Populous Editing History

The ability to edit Populous levels has been around for quite some time now. It was around 2001 that TheGabber and Hepple started working out the structure of the Populous levek files. Hepple left the Populous community a short while after making the original map editor. It was quite a powerful piece of software for its time, although it was quite buggy and crashed often. It still was far superior to our more primative methods of editing levels. Before map editors we used programs called Hex Editors to do our editing. If you really want to see how tough the old way was, RedWarrior has a tutorial on how to edit the levels of Populous all with a Hex Editor. This article (which is exteremely outdated in terms of MOD Worlds) can be found here. The first two or three maps that I have ever made were in Hex, they can be found in the map-pack entitled "Fate Worlds."

I only used Hepple's map editor for a short while because I joined Populous: Reincarnated around November of 2003. Even though it was out for two years by this time, it was still a bit glitchy, but still far superior to the Hex editor. One of the harder things about this editor was object placement, if you needed to delete an object, you needed to open a seperatte object editor that was programmed by SeaBass to take care of it. Together the editors worked well, and it was easily possible to get the job done.

About two or three months prior to joining Populous: Reincarnated's staff, another staff member by the name of ALACN had joined. He was working on a three-dimensional map editor at the time and was planning on releasing it to all users to make new Populous levels. This was complicated and slown down; however, because Populous: Reincarnated was about to make a big step to keeping Populous alive. ALACN was working on the matchmaker client at this time, so working on the editor was quite impossible. Electronic Arts had planned to shut down the Populous online servers on January 8, 2004. ALACN did meet his deadline with flying colors, the new matchmaker was a success and he finally started to continue work on the map editor. During his production of this wonderful piece of software, he took up many side projects, including making a Displacement editor, which was used to change all of the textures you see on the land in the game. Around the same time TedTycoon released his very own Palette editor which could be used to change the avaliable colors on-screen in the game. This was a ground-breaking tool which encourage a lot of people to change the tribe colors around and such.

ALACN's map editor was released in full around late 2004. It is now used primarily by myself to make all of my new maps for Populous. The map editor will edit all aspects of a single level in Populous. It is the most superior map-making software avaliable now, and is the easiest to use. Now that you know the history of map-making, let's see if you have what it takes to become part of the Populous map-making legacy.

Getting the Necessary Tools

Because all of the editors are not bundled together in one easy-to-use package, this section has been written to aid you in finding the software that you need to edito Populous.

The first and most important utility you need is the map editor. The map editor is used to edit Populous levels as well as their headers. ALACN's editor can be obtained from Populous: Reincarnated. From here go to their downloads page and look for "Populous World Editor" and download it. Once downloaded, extract the files from the ZIP archive to a location on your hard drive that you know you will keep these files. Run the editor by double-clicking PopEdt.exe (PopEdt if file extensions are not shown).

If all you plan to do is simply edit maps, then all you actually need is the map editor. You may feel obligated to download TedTycoon's Symmetry tool also if you have a hard time making levels, but it is not recommended to be used to make perfectly symmetric maps. Perfect symmetry, although fair, is not really all too much fun to play on. Levels that have slight advantages and disadvantages for players to learn for each color add replay value to the level, which in turn lures more people to your work. My suggestion to you is to use the symmetry tool to make the map symmetric in terms of it's skeleton. This will give the basic frame to the map, then you can tweak the land in small incriments for each player to add elemnts of strategy, add advantages, and add disadvantages. It is also not recommended to use the symmetry tool for objects because once again, maps are less fun when they are perfectly symmetric. The symmetry tool is a very nice program indeed, but don't take advantage of its power too much, treat it with respect, and it will enable you to make wonderful levels. TedTycoon's symmetry toold can be found at Populous: Return of the Spies.

If you are into the graphical aspect of Populous, then you will need some additional tools on the side to work with. You can use a palette editor to change the avaliable colors in a level, which in turn can enhance the graphics to a degree. Changing the colors too awkwardly will of course yield cruddy graphics; however, careful and accurate small changes can make for some interesting effects. Remember that when doing this, you are limited to a palette of 256 colors, that is all, so don't go overboard, and do not waste colors if at all possible. A good tool for editing the Populous Palettes is TedTycoons Palette Editor. This can be obtained from his website. If you need to ever convert the palettes from Populous Palettes to Windows Palettes, or vise versa, then you can use my Palette Converter utility that I have written to get the job done. This small utility can be obtained from my downloads page.

If you like to edit the landscape textures then you can download a small utility made by ALACN. ALACN's displacement editor will take any bitmap of the right proportions and convert it into the proper format. It will then take that image and make it into a displacement (The patterns or textures you see on the ground in Populous). A word to the wise, make sure that your pattern will reflect itself over the edges of the image so when it repeats you do not see these tacky lines in your precious artwork. The Displacement Editor can be obtained from the downlaods page at Populous: Reincarnated.

As far as Populous editing goes, there are some other tools out there for your use. Some have not been covered on this page simply because the developers of these tools do not have a website of their own to host them on. Some of these unmentioned tools are programs such as, but not limited to, a sprite extracter and compiler, and a sound file editor. You can try looking for these on the forums at Populous: Reincarnated.