Tutorials: Sky Modding
From Populous Wiki
Hello everyone, here for another tutorial.
This tutorial will be for sky making and modding for any and every level of your choice. I'll try and post a video soon as well and some pictures on this text version of the tutorial. Here I will go step by step in making a sky for Populous: The Beginning in software mode. For this example I will be making a sky for Face Off, which is class H. >http://www.popre.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=25&t=10634<.
For this tutorial you will need:
1) Photo editing program
2) Skytransformer ( which can be found on http://www.populous-online.co.uk )
3) Ted Tycoons Raw Editor or King Wargs Resource Editor.
Step 1: Load up photoshop or gimp ( whatever your choice of photoediting software you like ). Make the image size 512x512 ( try not to go too crazy with colors because the colors will have to be the same as the palette you load for the levels pal0-0.dat or whatever " Class " you choose. < .
![[1]](http://i.imgur.com/QJV4dcP.png){kind=link}
Step 2: Now that you've made the sky of your choice save the image as a .bmp file in a location that's easy for you to access.
![[2]](http://i.imgur.com/SWdIraM.png){kind=link}
Step 3: Load up skytransformer and open palette.. pal0-h.dat and save it in a different place ( I usually save on desktop for easy access ).. save as pal0-h.dat. YOU WILL NOT REPLACE THIS PAL0-h.DAT INTO THE GAME, THIS IS ONLY FOR LOADING INTO TED TYCOONS RAW EDITOR OR KING WARGS RESOURCE EDITOR TO LOAD THE SKY PROPERLY.
Step 4: Load up Ted Tycoons Raw editor or King Wargs Resource editor. ( This enables you to open the games color palette and the .bmp file you made earlier )
Step 5: Load the palette ( that you saved on your desktop from skytransformer ) into the Raw editor or Resource editor, for instance Face off is pal0-h.dat ( That you saved earlier REMINDER AGAIN )
Step 6: Load the .bmp image that you made earlier into the Raw Editor or Resource Editor. ( now you will be able to tell if your image is gonna work 100% properly by the colors displayed that you see in the Raw editor or Resource Editor. if the colors are messed up then more then likely it's gonna be messed up inside the game. )
Step 7: Save as POP3dat file. ( I usually save one on the desktop before I save it into the game and a backup file incase the one I load is messed up in the game so I can retry ). When I save the file I make sure it's saved as sky0-h.dat or whatever palette you're using, which when you replace it in the data folder you will see all the sky0-*.dat's.. so if you're replacing a sky for Face Off save as Sky0-h.dat ( or replace ).
Step 8: Test
What I usually do to test this is that I load Face off into the world editor and save it as Levl2001.dat so that it will appear as the first level inside the game. ( make sure if you're going to overwrite it in the Levels folder it's gonna save the Levl2001.dat, Levl2001.hdr, and Levl2001.ver ) You don't need the .ver file at all.. The .hdr saves the spell seletion and all that stuff.. so if you're going to test it in singleplayer you need to make sure that you set the AI in the world editor to 52 or 102 so that the game does not crash when you load it. )