*** Vendetta 1.8.437
- Improved fidelity of the specularity maps used by many recent ships,
for systems with GPUs capable of full DirectX 11 support, across
Windows (DX11), Mac (GL4) and Linux (GL4). Older GPUs will fall back
to alternative techniques.

Of the new ships, the rag seems less affected than any other (afaik). btw, for the guys who dont know what it is and are too lazy to look it up, this is what specularity is, according to wikipedia.

It has quite a bit of impact on content that uses normal mapping, which is the process by which we make things look more bumpy and detailed.

In this case, moving from DXT1 to BC4 compression yields a lot less visual compression artifacts. So, it's mostly that things look more like they were intended to look, instead of the unfortunate result of tradeoffs in compression standards. Effectively, things should look a bit "cleaner", especially areas around the edges of stuff, and transitions between high and low specularity.

If I posted before/afters on the textures, it would be super obvious, but in the game it's more likely to be noticeable on larger content, like capital ships.

There's also a bit more general commentary in the newspost.

So what is it?

Put simply, a specularity map is a texture that tells the renderer where an object is "shiny" versus "not shiny" and the degree of shiny-ness. It generally varies specular intensity specifically (there are other factors in specularity and final output, like the shader's specular falloff and general bidirectional reflectance distribution function, which are beyond a simple explanation).

So, when you look at something like the New Centurion below:


You can see an area of specular highlight that is focused on the left ship, back towards the rear of the engine (right-side engine).

If we used no specular map, this intensity would just be smoothly covering the entire area, it would be uniformly shiny (or matte, or whatever) and only react to the angle of the polygon to the light.

However, because there is a specularity map, you can see variations in the reflectivity of light, dark versus shiny areas, which are also carried into other aspects of the texture.

So, for instance, if we make a texture that has a "scratch in the paint", if that scratch is intended to expose "bare metal", we might give the paint a relatively matte specularity, but then make the scratch fairly shiny, to impart a little more realism.

From an art standpoint, this is something new artists have to learn, because each texture is separate, so you have to consider what will be "shiny" or "not-shiny" when conceptualizing the texture mentally. It isn't something you can just "draw", because you have to think through have the different materials and shaders will impact one another. There are some more recent tools that help with visualization, but it's still important to be able to pre-conceive what you want to do (with available shaders/tech), in your head.

In the case of texture compression, some standards (like older "DXT1" format) tended to create a lot of ugly artifacts, especially on specularity maps. These artifacts were often more visually apparent, because of how specularity directly defines the "shiny highlights".

So, in changing from the old-way (DXT1) to the new-way (BC4, requiring DX10 hardware, or DX11 in our case due to the shader/renderer requirements of our engine), we've greatly improved the fidelity of this aspect of content, while using no additional disk space in the download. The compression is just "better": for the same amount of disk, it produces much higher quality output.

The rough thing is pushing out the big patch, or requiring new people to always download a big patch, so we wanted to get the into the game soon so we could push a new "full-install" version and minimize downloads for new people.