I'm trying to create the world of The Sims Medieval in CAW to be used in The Sims 3.
Instead of rushing into it I've been reading (and trying to understand!) a lot, because I don't want to waste lots of time and effort doing something in the wrong way when if I had known the better (easier but also with good results) way I could have achieved the same but faster and with less suffering

So, if I haven't misunderstood, I can't extract the height map of TSM world because CAW won't open it.
I've tried some things learning from HystericalParoxysm thread on Editing Premade Worlds (thanks, so much, by the way). It works with any Sims3 world, but worldcastle.world it's a different kind of .world despite having the same extension and sharing some of the files inside it, so CAW does not accept it.

Anyway, I was wondering if any of the files inside this .world file could be used to create sort of a height map that CAW would open and use.
I know nothing about .dds files and maybe other image files that I wouldn't be able to recognize and use.
So if someone knowing what I'm talking about could give me some advice I would be really thankful (don't want to build the world COMPLETELY from scratch if I can count on with a height map to start with).
If no one knows what I'm talking about (even people used to rip files and look inside them, and changing them to fit their game preferences) well, then I have probably explained myself terribly and I would thank some of these experienced people asking me to explain better

Thank you in advance

I've never played Medieval so I'm not familiar with it. But could you open it in S3PE and poke around until you find the height map? If S3PE won't open it, you could try changing the extension from .world to .package. Once you extract the height map, it should be easy enough to use in CAW or SuperCAW...might need to rescale it to a CAW default map size in PNG format.

Thanks for your reply, PoisonFrog.
Yes, I managed to open it in S3PE and that's how I know it has some files in common with Sims3 worlds, but it also has other files that don't exist inside the Sims3 .world files and I guess that's what makes it different (despite having the same file extension) and the reason why CAW won't open it.

But, I don't know how to extract a height map from S3PE; I only know how to do it from CAW, and I can't open the world with CAW.
I've tried creating a simple flat world with CAW, then opening it with S3PE and overwriting the files with the ones I got from the medieval .world.
First I tried changing only the files they have in common, and then CAW opened it, but it looked just like the simple flat world I created in the first step.
Then I tried changing those common files and also adding the files that only the castleworld.world has, but then CAW does not open it.

So my only idea now is to find out if among all the files I get when opening the world with S3PE there is an image file that could be used as a height map, or that I can work with in Photoshop. I have only found one .png, and it's not a map (more a thumbnail or something of the sort).
There are some .dds files, but I have not experience at all with them or other image file types that I might not know, so my question was if one of those files I get in S3PE could be the key to a height map or something useful to build the world.

Anyway, since I'm not that hopeful that I can finally get that very useful height map of castleworld.world, I've been working on alternatives to avoid creating the world completely from scratch (which also has the problem of getting the proportions right), just in case that height map never comes to life...

Well, if you do pursue it, I'd start in S3PE and look at all files with the _IMG tag and then the remaining files. To export the file...select it in the pane, then in the Resource tab: Export>To file. Most likely it'll be a DDS file(s) and not a png, so you'd need an image editor with the Nvidia DDS plugin...like Photoshop to convert it to png for CAW import(I think Gimp will accept the plugin, also).

Luck

Thank you; I'll try
If it doesn't work, I've made progress on making my own "height map" (or sort of) using the combination of the map seen from above and a panoramic image of all the world.
One way or the other, I believe I will get it right enough