Shades help - home & index

Welcome!

Welcome to Shades help index! Well, not really. This page is here just befause it seemed right to have some place that would/could display some information about Shades etc. upon viewing the help index, buf the real index is always displayed in the list on the left. If you don't know where to start, just browse the pages in the order they are written, top to down.

Current Shades version: 4.9.1, status: stable on XP and probably other NT-based systems, unsupported on 9x systems (but might work fine anyway).

You can download Shades from tools listing.

What is this about?

If you came here from some search engine results, chances this is what you are inerested in are, literally, zero. Anyway, what is this about: this place is online help page for a program called Shades. Shades are meant to be an picture post-processing graphical editor for artists working on pictures for Simutrans, a computer game. The sole purpose of Shades' existence is dealing with special colors, which, as their name suggests, are special and thus are diplayed in game differently - eg. glowing lights. These should be only where wanted, but due to Murphy's law they slip most of time to unwanted places, and finding them (often single pixels) is rather difficult. Unlike real graphic editors, Shades do just a few things around Simutrans' special colors - but properly and easily, because while graphical editors aim to be as universal as possible, Shades are only for Simutrans related things. This is also why you probably won't find the information here of any use to you: if you are reading this, you didn't know, but this place is useful only for a handful of insiders. Anyway, feel free to lurk around, I don't have here anything secret.