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CD Player's Site Hints, Tips, Strategy and FAQs for playing Populous III online

Two-player maps
    Standard
    Undiscovered Worlds
Three-player maps
    Standard
    Undiscovered Worlds
Four-player maps
    Standard
    Undiscovered Worlds

Introduction
This section contains the real meat of this site, because knowing the terrain and having the right strategy is key to victory. The strategies have been contributed by a range of players (thanks guys!) but more would be good, and some maps still have nothing to their name, so if you would like to write something, do step forward. The maps are really useful for making sense of the strategies, and it is not always easy in the heat of battle to see how it all fits together. A confounding factor is that the maps for the levels are square - yes, that's right, square! The impression of a globe is given by the display routines, which 'slope' the further squares down, but the map really is square, and is one reason why it is easy to get disorientated.

Shakey Jake was the first to produce maps for the levels, based on sketches, and showing the locations of the heads. I have linked to these maps on Shakey's site where they are available (the 'Shakeys map' link). He then went on to hack the level data files and found that the maps are square with 128x128 data points, each point representing the height above sea level. He took these points and mapped them to a palette file, and produced minimaps, with different heights being represented by different colours. I thought that was really cool, and wanted to add the facility to call up a map for each of the levels on my site, but that wholesale plundering of Shakeys site, plus the hit on his bandwidth was more than I felt comfortable with doing. So it was left for some months, until I had some time spare time over Xmas when I started tinkering around...

The end result was that I wrote a program to extract the map data and match it to an external palette file (so that the colours can easily be changed) and recentre the maps where necessary. I then converted them to .GIF format, worked out how to produce a 'stay on top' console window, and added them to the page. Now, for every level, there is a button which says 'Map' which will give you a minimap to refer to while reading. If you have your browser window maximised, there should be just enough room on the right hand side to access the scroll bar of the main window.

If you would like to play with this yourself, you can download the program and a full set of image files from the downloads section. Have fun!