Reverse Engineering Comanche Terrain Maps

One detail that was fun to find was that height map files also have a palette! It is not simply a gray ramp. It's a false-color palette split into bands of 16 shades each: blues, then oranges, and so on, with a gray band further up and magenta filling the unused entries. Open a D file in a paint program with this palette and you get a contour map, where each color band covers 16 height units. I'll try to confirm this with Kyle Freeman himself, but I can definitely see NovaLogic artists using exactly that view to paint and check their terrain files.

You can't just mention that and not drop a screenshot! :-)