What did frictional games use to make nrm, spec, and height for the planes?

[MrBehemoth]

Whilst you can use things like ssbump to turn a height map into a normal map, your going to need a decent height map to start with. If you plug your diffuse map into ssbump, it's gonna come out wrong. I suspect that FG either used some special texture painting software, or modelled the topography in 3d and baked it to a normal, or just got stuck in and painted a height map by hand.

The last one is what I usually do, creating a height it in Ps, as a layer over the diffuse, before converting it to a normal in ssbump. There's probably lots of different methods (and tutorials) for doing that.