Editing Terrain / Heightmap

[evargrave]

After digging a bit through the game's data files, I stumbled upon a 500 megabyte .tif entitled "fullmap" and it turns out to be the entire game world's heightmap!

I decided to fiddle with the image by inverting it and changing the levels. I saved it, loaded the game and this is what blew my mind:
It simply just worked.

Every building, NPC, grass sprite, rock detail model, etc. all aligned to the new heightmap automatically with no apparent problems.
While scouring the information repositories on Ogre3D, I found a multitude of tools to edit terrain and export landmass textures and foliage-cover maps, but nothing that seemed explicit to the engine itself or anything that was all-inclusive.

What I'm wondering is if anybody knows the inner-workings of the terrain system for Kenshi and how to possibly make a full set of terrain assets to create a custom landmass. It seems that making the world heightmap work is pretty straightforward (amazingly simple, to say the least), but it's hard to tell what all these other overlaymaps I found specifically do or how they are employed by the engine.

If it's a relatively straightforward workflow to change all these terrain features, I could see myself kicking around ideas for personal projects based on this game's framework and maybe start writing a program to manage and import/export the terrain layers.

Any information would be greatly appreciated.

[evargrave]

So, after reconstructing the 8x8 grid that the overlaymap is sectioned in, it seems that these are actually the base terrain textures! It looks like you could theoretically make any landmass that you want (not sure about changing the size, though) in something like GeoControl, export the heightmap and any texture you may have applied to it and load it up in the game.

I'm going to give it a shot soon, so wish me luck. Even if nobody cares to read this, I'll still keep you posted in case I make some breakthrough with this approach to editing the terrain. I'm pretty excited about being able to make a custom Land and can't wait to get enough information together to make a barebones world-overhaul mod.

At the moment, I'm foolishly rendering the entire 16K heightmap to 3D in Photoshop with a total of ~9 million polygons O_O. I need more RAM.

[arkhiel]

I tried not to create landmass but at least to recolor the ground, doesn't work well with LOD and such :/ .
Wanted to get rid of the orange tone and replace it with a more desertic one...
You can set the ground color in biome, index modifications cause crashes :/ .