Game map of Warlords

The game map of Warlords is stored in the file ILLURIA.MAP.

• It is an uncompressed, raw tile map.
• The map dimensions are 109 tiles wide by 156 tiles high.
• Each tile is represented by a 16-bit integer.
• The file contains no header or footer; it consists purely of tile data.

This layout results in a total of 109 x 156 = 17,004 tiles, matching the file size of 34,008 bytes.

Game map as an image

There is also a bitmap file, PICTS/STRAT.PCK, that contains a visual representation of the game map as rendered on screen. Once cropped from its decorative border, the dimensions of this bitmap are:

• Width: 218 pixels (109 tiles × 2)
• Height: 156 pixels (1:1 ratio with tile rows)

This image serves as the strategic view (aka minimap) of the game used during gameplay.

Tile Format

  7   6   5   4   3   2   1   0
+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+
|   |   |   |   |   |   |   |   |  ← 1st byte (low byte)
+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+
| 1†|       Tile Id             |  ← 2nd byte (high byte)
+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+

• The first byte (low byte) likely encodes movement cost, restrictions, etc.
• The second byte (high byte) contains the tile ID.
• Graphical tiles are 40×40 pixels and are mapped to tiles from the file PICTS/SCENERY.PCK.

Note †: Tile ID 0x00 is visually identical to tile ID 0x80 (both are plain grass), but it is the only tile whose highest bit (bit 7 of the second byte) is unset. All other tile IDs have bit 7 set (i.e., values 0x80–0xFF).

The only values in the first byte are:

• 0x00 / 0bx0000_0000
• 0x07 / 0bx0000_0111
• 0x17 / 0bx0001_0111
• 0x27 / 0bx0010_0111