What does a game’s mountain look like inside a file?

What does a mountain look like inside the files of the helicopter game Comanche?

Inside the file

Pezzi’s September 29 analysis reports paired height and color maps, stored as PCX images whose first eight bytes were replaced by “Kyle DTA.” This is his reverse-engineering finding.

From a grid to a view

Original developer Kyle Freeman’s patent US5550959A describes terrain as elevations and colors, rendered in distance-scaled cross-sections. It explains image generation, not the file bytes Pezzi examined.

Think in three squares

Try a fictional example: label three squares on graph paper with heights 2, 7 and 3, then assign each a color. These are neither meters nor game data. Seen from the side, the middle square becomes a candidate peak. Changing a color while keeping its height differs from changing the height while keeping its color. An actual screen also needs viewpoint and visibility calculations.

V’s view

V’s view. This story adds a question to ask of a game’s mountains. Alongside “How carefully was it drawn?” comes “What information was worth storing?” Part of the pleasure lies in looking behind the finished landscape for its maker’s chosen representation.

Read next

Read next: Pikuma traces the file analysis; Freeman’s patent describes image generation. This explanation comes from reading public documents. We did not decode game files or run the program, and have reproduced no game images or terrain assets.