What I wanted to ask was if env effect used -spec map RGB values when an alpha channel is present. Or whether in this situation, it only uses this last channel info. (I DO know that specular effect uses -spec map RGB values, despite env or no env. ).
I thought that was the answer, but it may be a bit too vague.
For the env map blending it will use from the spec map RGB
or alpha (in the case that the spec map has an alpha channel).
why am i being ignored?
I thought that I answered you actually. Guess I forgot though.
If by "cleanest" you mean the most simple, then that would be l-v. There really isn't a whole lot different between l-v, le-v and lf-v though, as far as complexity goes. But there really isn't a whole lot to do with the vertex shaders (since it's not very flexible without a material system). If you want to play around with the light settings then that's where you would do it, but otherwise you would mostly just be wasting your time. You can turn off some of the lights to get a good speed boost (if you dropped 2 or 3 lights out then you would probably get about a 40-50 FPS improvement on most models), but then you lose some visual effects in the process. Most visual changes would come from changes to the fragment shaders, but like with the vertex shaders, you don't have a whole lot of room to play with it all without a material system in place.
And the fog stuff is for full nebula missions. They aren't used otherwise.