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ORIGINAL: Fishbreath
I have a heightmap bitmap I generated from NED data that I'm using for a map I'm working on. Inspecting the bitmap file generated from Dmitriy's QGIS style file, it seems accurate, in the sense that a point that my source data says is 57 meters above sea level has the color value (57,2,16), which matches the scheme in the North-East Italy map.

However, when I have Armored Brigade in map editing mode, the terrain type/elevation tooltip says that the lowest point in the 15km square I'm editing is 0 meters, and all other heights are relative to that. Is that something to do with map editing mode, or am I missing a step in the heightmap generation or map creation?

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Also, how does the lights.png file work? Is it just an overlay on the map at night, or is there more to it than that?

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I think the way this works is as the tooltip suggests - the game does not show absolute height, but instead will take the lowest point of the map as 0 regardless of its actual height (colour) as per the height map. I'm not sure exactly why this is done - but I suspect it may be simply to do with how the AI reads the height map.
One thing you can always do is create some labels at key elevation points (e.g. hills) and cross-check their relative heights to see if the height map is accurate or not.

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ORIGINAL: Fishbreath
e: while I have your ear, what did you do for heightmap smoothing? I tried a few QGIS smoothing effects on SRTM data, but wasn't able to get a decent result, and ended up using the USGS surveying data I mentioned in the first post, which is obviously not a workable solution for most of the militarily interesting parts of the globe.

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2) using software

This program was made by Juha so that you can quickly convert the elevation map in the correct format. The only difficulty is that it is launched through the Windows command line, so if you are not experienced in this matter, then you may have very minor difficulties.

- First you need to download it HERE
- copy into something like C:\1 to some simple folder
- now to launch it, click Win + R and the launch window will open and enter the command “cmd” there so the command line will be launched
- now enter the command C: \1\convertheight.exe or simply drag the downloaded .exe file into the command window
- if you press enter, then most likely the program will give an error
Invalid arguments, should be <input> <output>. Optional: -sca <scale> -min <minimum> -smo <smooth>
This means that after the command you need to add the name of the file that is the source, the name of the file that will be in the end and you can also add the necessary optional attributes:
-sca - the number of transitions of the red channel, that is, how many times the height will pass the mark of 255 meters. To find out, then subtract the minimum height from the maximum height and divide by 255.
-min - the minimum height in the sector to correctly display the height reference point
-smo - level of relief smoothing. SRTM data is often quite noisy, so to get rid of this point, you can add smoothnes. Very useful option
- download your sector-relief image in bmp format to the program root folder.
- now we need to add data and the command will look something like this: C:\1\convertheight.exe file1.bmp height.bmp -sca 7 -min 215 -smo 1

Clicking on Enter you start the process and the final file will appear in the folder where the program is located.

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ORIGINAL: Fishbreath

I gave it a try, but I'm not quite sure how to export the elevation data from QGIS so that ConvertHeight can process it correctly. It doesn't seem to process GeoTIFF files, and if I convert a (grayscale) GeoTIFF to a bitmap, the resulting ConvertHeight output is incorrect, using colors which don't map to the right elevations.

Starting from a heightmap raster layer in QGIS, what steps do I need to take to use ConvertHeight?