To be honest, I don't actually know what those numbers do yet

The original values in flatdemo come from Totomi. Where the 'spikes' pointing straight up or at an angle?

In the hex editor you probably see something a little like this:
00A0 0000 0008 0000 44FD FFFF

The A0 you refer to is present. The numbers are in hexadecimal. Two hex digits = 1 byte, or eight binary characters (1s and 0s). The example above contains 12 bytes (24 hex digits). This represents 1 point on the map, of which there are, I believe, 441 (21x21). The 4 bytes on the right control height directly. In C/C++ programming we would refer to these 4 bytes as a 'signed long'.

In the example above, the height is -700. All height values are negative. The lower the number, the higher the point on the map. For example, altering this to -2000 (change the 44FD to 33F8), would create a hill.

I will post some more details on this stuff once I've figured more of it out.

------------------
AkaiRob Hojo
Honour to Clan Akai Ken