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User:TedTycoon

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Revision as of 03:27, 5 August 2007 by TedTycoon (talk | contribs) (Updated auto-biography)
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Scratch Start

TedTycoon lives in England and has been playing Populous since 1999. After finishing Populous and playing multiplayer on a local area network connection, TedTycoon found the official online matchmaker where TedTycoon started playing with the name 'Mohicans'. TedTycoon was not that good at that time but had fun anyway.

Later On

TedTycoon had reached the rank of Spy when EA stopped hosting the matchmaker. During the last days of the official matchmaker people were interested in playing new levels, so TedTycoon wrote his first utility which made it possible to play the single player levels in multiplayer.

Since this time TedTycoon has always called himself TedTycoon (as TedTycoon was also a fan of Transport and Rollercoaster Tycoon). Using an online fan launcher TedTycoon always kept Spy as his rank which was how it came to be his favourite follower. After that TedTycoon made a fan site to host the Level Changer download and various tips.

The Unofficial Crew

On the 8th of January 2004, EA shut down the matchmaker. TedTycoon then carried on playing on the unofficial matchmaker hosted by Populous Reincarnated. Having discovered how to edit map files using a hex editor, TedTycoon then started work on his second utility, the Spell Editor, which modifies header files. This allows you to edit the spells, buildings, landscape, fog and god mode available to a level.

TedTycoon has been adding utilities and making improvements to them ever since. Alacn (programmer of the matchmaker) was always a great help if TedTycoon wanted to know where to find something in the Populous files. After joining Populous Reincarnated as a secondary admin, TedTycoon was asked to write something to change the Populous colours, and wrote the Palette Editor.

Later on, TedTycoon realised it was hard to make your own Populous multiplayer levels fair, and copying objects in levels was frustrating. TedTycoon wanted a program which would quickly copy land and objects, changing the colours of the tribes as it did so. As soon as his Symmetry Tool was released, it became very popular, and thousands of players have downloaded it to make their own maps. TedTycoon then made a mappack with Khickman, which was called Red Worlds. TedTycoon also made another mappack called Symmetry worlds where each world was a mirrored version of existing levels using his new utility.

When Warg started up a group called Wildman Productions, TedTycoon helped Wildman Productions make a level tester and contribute with some of their other projects like Populous: Tribal Conquest. TedTycoon has updated the Symmetry Tool several times to add new features, and it still downloaded by someone virtually every day.

TedTycoon programed a 2D user friendly map editor with Khickman. Unfortunately the project was discontinued.

Later on Khickman created a program to change the spells, buildings of a saved game or resync game in populous so players could add AI to multiplayer games. Ted got the idea of a program that viewed each player's spells, and followers and used some of the offsets to help him. He make a graphical program which displayed weather the spells were charging, available, how many shots and how much it has charged. After the program was passed to other players Ted released the MP Monitor officially.

TedTycoon then programmed a brand new mdi enviroment script editor which is compatible in multiple scripting languages. It has a clever intelliSense feature and converting features. Help from Nexus was involved in the making of it. The editor was released and can be downloaded via his site.

Ted's Populous Site was then made into one page featuring only his downloads.

During the winter TedTycoon programmed a random map generator which can generate maps via a click of a button and a custom script. The project was converted to a windows dll available for any program that needs it including the matchmaker. The beta version can still be found here.

In Late May 2007 TedTycoon programmed a Sprite Editor which can edit all the 2D images in Populous like the panel and the followers. This allows people to easily swap the tribe colours by swapping the follower and shaman sprites. The Sprite Editor can be downloaded from his site as well.

The Present

In Summer 2007 TedTycoon has been re-writing all his utilities to .Net Framework so that they are up to date with todays operating systems. The Palette Editor and Spell Editor were the first to be updated and to be follower by the new MP Monitor and Symmetry Tool.

Contributions

TedTycoon has made several contributions to the Populous community; here are the high points:

Website

For more information about TedTycoon's work, see his website, Ted's Populous Site