[Skullar]

what the hell is shine mapping ????

I know its enabled via the "specular" feature, but what exactly does it do ?

[Darklord42]

Makes things shiny, perhaps? 

[ARSPR]

Shine maps set the shinniness from direct light sources. A fully shiny metal would have a full white shine map (R=G=B=255). A gold surface, (with yellow brights), would be, more or less, R=G=255, B=0.

Test how the game looks with or without -spec flag. Also read Texturing section in Wiki

Also notice that shine map alpha channel is used to set the amount of environmental mapping reflectiveness (-env & -alpha_env flags). A full white alpha channel, which was unused before 3.6.9. build, cause the full background mirror effect that some models in Media vps 3.6.8 zeta have.