GHF Heightfield Data

2008-11-05, 13:54 by Keshire

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cultofbyron

2021-08-23, 01:40 #1

Member since Jul 2013 · 3 posts · Location: Ilkley, West Yorkshire
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Subject: GHF Heightfield Data

So, after 11 years of tinkering and bimbling around and pestering coders who had long since moved on from this, I've managed to get something sensible out of the ghf heightfield files.

Focusing on the Brightwood ghf (ch3heightfieldabandfarm_id_926492ed.ghf) I could not see any discernible pattern in the data. So on a whim I decided to open it in 7zip and voila: export360/data/worlds/albion/brightwood/heightfields/ch3heightfieldabandfarm_id_926492ed.ghf about 8Mb.

First 14 bytes of nowt, then two integers of 769 (suspiciously like image dimensions) followed by a repeating pattern of 14 bytes throughout the file neatly organised into two columns.

*Cracks knuckles and opens Photoshop, 5 minutes later...:*

I renamed the extracted ghf file as a raw and with the following settings:

Dimensions
Width: 769
Height: 769

Channels
Count: 14
Interleaved: ✓
Depth: 8-bits

Header Size: 20 bytes

[Image: https://i.ibb.co/Pm33Twk/Brightwood-Heightmap.jpg]

[Image: https://i.ibb.co/Pm33Twk/Brightwood-Heightmap.jpg]

Ok, so not perfect, but usable and a massive step in the right direction, another 11 years and it'll be about there!

I can probably work with this for what I need to do, and I will get onto the Fable 3 ones once I've done these.

cultofbyron

2021-08-31, 01:38 #2

Member since Jul 2013 · 3 posts · Location: Ilkley, West Yorkshire
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So I've managed to make some headway with these heightmap files so that I am now able to convert most of the .ghf files exported from levels.bnk into usable greyscale images*.

Brightwood (Spring):
[Image: https://i.ibb.co/KLTQtn0/Brightwood.jpg]

[Image: https://i.ibb.co/KLTQtn0/Brightwood.jpg]

This was achieved by renaming the uncompressed .ghf file to a .raw and opening in Photoshop with the previously mentioned settings.

Selecting the Channels tab revealed 3 channels for RGB, in this case the greyscale channel was G, and there followed several other layers which seem to contain texture information and paths, which will probably be useful when creating world and local maps.

I then deleted every channel but the greyscale. However, this still needed some work.
It seemed that at the midpoint (128) maybe due to the way the file is structured/endianness(?)/decompression, with high and low points rendered as 0-255 separately:
[Image: https://i.ibb.co/g7wtYQY/brightwoodglitch.jpg]

[Image: https://i.ibb.co/g7wtYQY/brightwoodglitch.jpg]

So all I did here was select the darker portions first, paste to a new layer and lighten them, then darken the lighter portions. Then I flipped vertically to get the first image in this post.

As you can see, there is still a little glitching at the bottom right but as this is not a traversable part of the Brightwood region, I can fix this either by smoothing in Photoshop before exporting the final .bmp or .raw file, or by smoothing the terrain in the Construction Set/Creation Kit.

Right, on to Fable 3 and the rest of the Fable 2 .mdls I need!

- Not all of the .ghf files exported from levels.bnk were usable so I went into Hex Workshop and just exported them manually, which has so far worked fine with Westcliff and Wraithmarsh.

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