The Land Shading Palette (fade0-#.dat) is used in Software Render mode to help the game to create the light and dark effects using only the 256 available colours. In D3D it is not used for this purpose as your video card’s GPU shades and creates the light effects with True Colour. This palette is also used to render the Fog of War in both Software and D3D mode.

This file is the key of the Software Render mode. Many mod makers forget to make this, so it will look weird in Software Render. Not everybody plays in D3D so to make mods people like, don’t forget to care about Software Render.

The image size is 256×64. Each column represents a colour on the main palette, (pal0-#.dat) col #1 represents the first colour, col #2 the second colour, and so on until 256. The rows represents the alternatives on the main palette to use. Row #33 must contain the colour of the palette, for example col #1 row #33 must be the first colour in the main palette. From row #32 to #1 in each column you must pick even darker alternates for the given colour, from row #34 to #64 you must pick lighter alternates for that colour.

Why it’s important

A bad example for the Land Shading Palette is the Populous Reloaded. Its Land Shading Palette looks like this:

If you take a look at the D3D screenshot, you see no difference, because the GPU renders the shading and light – but if you take a look at the Software Render Screenshot, you can see the difference:

Don’t let your mods look like this, always make a good Land Shading Palette!

If you are too lazy to make one yourself or you messed it up like in the previous example, you can use the Land Shading Palette Generator. This program uses the colours from a Populous Palette to generate the Ideal Land Shading Palette in True Colour. You need to Manually paste the palette on it and put to Populous as it outputs a True Colour BMP. You need Ted’s Raw Editor and either Photoshop or Paint to do the job. I don’t explain it, I think you know enough about editing images if you even start making a mod.

How to use the program:

1. Open the palette file

2. Adjust the colour differences, the left box adjusts the darker colours, the right the lighter ones.

3. Click the Generate button

4. Save the Land Shading Palette or adjust the differences and re-generate the palette. It should look like the Bullfrog palettes to archieve good effects.

5. Paste the palette on it with Photoshop and save it with Ted’s Raw Editor.