I just found a bug in beta 15 (and 14, and 13, and 12..etc.): if you use ATTR_shiny_rat or GLOBAL_specular with an intermediate value, e.g. between 0 and 1, you get an oily effect when HDR is off.
This is a bug in one of the shaders. We didn’t see it early because I have encouraged our art team to set the specular ratio to 1.0 and leave it there and use the normal map to modulate specularity. You should take that advice too! The GPU is really good at reading textures, and the CPU is not particularly good at interrupting the GPU to change what it’s doing, which is what ATTR_shiny_rat does.
Beta 16 will fix this; in the mean time, what you see in HDR mode (the top two FX settings) is correct, for the purpose of figuring out if your art looks good.
Ben, I’ve noticed reflections using a normal map are mis-oriented, i.e., rotated 90 or 180 degrees and have a very non-realistic reflection image, that is, very different from what you’d expect to see as a reflection (in one case, the reflected image would be something on the ground extremely large to look not only distracting but just absolutely ugly…like an enormous taxi line). On the contrary, using the ATTR_shiny_rat of 1 (for dark glass)…the reflection is correctly oriented, and realistic. Realistic means like when below the glass, the sky reflects through it…versus what seems to be just arbitrary images via the normal map. Maybe you’ve seen this but wondering if that’s an author error or something in the system. Have checked with one other scenery author and his observation matched my own. Thanks. — Greg
It sounds like an error in the normal map – ANY reflection you can get with ATTR_shiny_rat, you can get with a _neutral_ normal map.