Editing Terrain / Heightmap
Posted: Thu Feb 02, 2017 10:01 am
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.
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.