Hacker News Reader

I thought the same. There are a ton of nerds (I count myself among them) who loved this game in its day and would happily take a crack at programmatically extracting these data points.

View on HN

Perhaps this is a good place to mention that someone is working on remaking the SMAC engine, the project is called "glsmac" on github. Unit graphics seem to be one of the major sticking points since the game used some kind of ancient forgotten voxel format.

Looks like they've figured out the tile format. Haven't grokked the whole codebase, but this seems to be the code for parsing out the data: https://github.com/afwbkbc/glsmac/blob/55fc72047607425149164...

So yeah, someone technical with the map file and half an hour could probably have gotten him the full elevation specs.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com