In defence of map_heights.hgt

Greetings!

I had encountered a problem while editing my map.

After developing a sudden interest in Carthage and all things related Carthage I wanted to add those two funky looking lakes southwest of Tunis already present in Mundus Magnus just for the sake of it (Chott el Djerid and Chott Melrhir, I guess).

I made a neat copy and paste from Mundus Magnus, saved everything and loaded the game.

Everything seemed ok, but just for one turn. Soon I found that something went wrong with the map generation. The port at Lesbos was erased and there were a lot of random water tiles where it was supposed to be earth, like in between Athens and its port. :inquisitive:

But what it's worst: After restoring my old map_regions.tga, map_ground_types.tga and map_heights.tga (basically, everything) the problem still subsisted. I could only solve this when I copied map_heights.hgt from a very old backup.

Long story short: finally I could modify map_types.tga and map_heights.tga to add those two lakes and keep the regions in my map just as I want, but only after generating a proper map_heights.hgt file, thanks to this tool from alpaca:

https://forums.totalwar.org/vb/showthread.php?t=56442

So it seems map_heights.hgt is not that useless after all. ~:confused:

You are using BI right?

most likely culprit is you had RGB 0,0,0 'land tiles' it counts those as sea if you don't have a .hgt file, vanilla map had some that needed fixing if you take out .hgt. So long as you avoid using those and start from RGB 1,1,1 at least on the odd/odd numbered pixels you should be OK without .hgt

Nope, RTW 1.5, but Maka is right (heh, as always).

Those pixels in map_heights.tga were damn RGB 0,0,0! :yes: :applause: :2thumbsup:

:inquisitive: Still can't understand that mess with hgt.
Do I need .hgt at all when will start building map heights?

No, not at all if you don't have any dot with color RGB 0,0,0 in map_heights.tga.

If you do so, you can replace it with RGB 1,1,1 or use the tool I linked to generate a .hgt file.

hmm, ive found the 3 most useful files for making a new map are regions, ground types, and heights. toether they can pretty much make a new map, and you can change coastlines in ground types and heights without changing any other files and it wil still load. even they dont have to be exactly the same!