I've been doing some testing of lighting settings since Swifty's last patch that fixed albedo and specular handling, and set both spec_tube and spec_point to zero. The effect is that there's exactly no lighting contribution from any tube or point sources.
My understanding is that point and tube lights should have a diffuse/albedo component that should still be visible if the specular component is set to zero. To test this, I turned spec_static to zero as well, but ships are still lit (dully) by sun lights. Clearly, the way the engine handles static lighting is different from how it handles point and tube lighting. This is strange for an engine attempting to do PBR.
If I toggle deferred rendering on and off in launcher, I can see that the old rendering gave diffuse contributions as well as specular contributions from point and tube lights. This is lost in deferred rendering. The easiest way to demonstrate this is with Damage Lightning in the ship lab. Dark areas of the model should light up quite a bit with damage lightning (diffuse component + specular component) and do in the old renderer. In the new renderer, the light component only exists as specular. If you turn spec_point to zero, the damage lightning has no lighting effect on the model whatsoever.
Is this behavior intended? I feel like there's a lot of dynamic lighting behavior that is getting lost with the current deferred renderer.
(as a side nitpick, is it possible for the deferred renderer to always render sun lights, regardless of intensity? It's odd when during beam spam or mass explosions the sun suddenly turns off and the *only* diffuse lighting source in the scene disappears)