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Environmental mapping channel in -shine maps not working anymore

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Col. Fishguts:
While working on some custom models, i noticed that the environmental mapping effect via the alpha channel in -shine maps seems to be gone.

At first I thought it might be due to my DDS conversions, but checking in the current mediaVPs, I see the same there. The cockpit glass only shows the specular highlight of the local sun, but there are no reflections from the nebulae.
This happens on my machine both with FSO builds from 22.X/23.X and 24..0 (haven't checked further back), environment maps are not disabled in the launcher.
Was the feature deprecated for -shine maps when moving to PBR, or did I accidentally disable env mapping on my end?

wookieejedi:

--- Quote from: Col. Fishguts on March 26, 2024, 01:31:04 pm ---While working on some custom models, i noticed that the environmental mapping effect via the alpha channel in -shine maps seems to be gone.

At first I thought it might be due to my DDS conversions, but checking in the current mediaVPs, I see the same there. The cockpit glass only shows the specular highlight of the local sun, but there are no reflections from the nebulae.
This happens on my machine both with FSO builds from 22.X/23.X and 24..0 (haven't checked further back), environment maps are not disabled in the launcher.
Was the feature deprecated for -shine maps when moving to PBR, or did I accidentally disable env mapping on my end?

--- End quote ---

Looks like you have the `Disable Post processing` box checked? Highly recommend enabling post processing since a lot of the modern FSO shaders need it to work properly :)

Col. Fishguts:
Ah yes, forgot to mention that I disabled postprocessing for this screenshot, since the tonemappers seem to wash out a lot of the shinemap effect, so it's more visible with postprocessing disabled.
But the env maps are not working for me with or without postprocessing.

Col. Fishguts:
I did some more testing. When I save the -shine map in a format without alpha channel (e.g. DXT1), the model look the same as when using a map with data in the alpha channel.
This used to work differently, shine maps without alpha channel used to result in very glossy ships due to

--- Quote ---Available -shine map without alpha channel. The level of environmental reflection is based on the luminance derived from the -shine map RGB values.
--- End quote ---


So I guess this feature was removed when moving to the PBR render pipeline, with the alpha channel in the reflectance map taking its role?

EDIT: Found it in an old thread from Swifty:  https://www.hard-light.net/forums/index.php?topic=89551.0


--- Quote ---Legacy specular maps, known as shine maps, are still accepted by appending “-shine” to texture maps. Legacy specular maps do not support gloss channels as the alpha channel is specified to attenuate environment map reflections. The RGB channels are not gamma corrected. A constant gloss factor will be applied to the corresponding model instead of per-pixel gloss.
--- End quote ---

So everything works as specified, I was just not up to date how the old formats are handled nowadays.

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