Introduction and a few possibly nooby questions about the engine.

[Con]

- How does the engine handle diffuse, normal and spec maps? Is it like source where sometimes the specular map in contained in the alpha channel of the normal map? I want tons of details on stuff like that. I also want to know how to manipulate the shaders on certain materials in similar ways to how you can manipulate them with commands contained in a .vmt file in source.

For anything bsp, specular is contained the the diffuse alpha, and the bump map alpha is for transparency. You can compile a normal map and use that, or you can edit the bitmap tag to say it's a height map and it will convert bump maps to normal maps when your recompile the bitmap.

In a shader_model, the diffuse alpha controls transparency and the shader uses a multipurpose map with channels: green=self-illumination, blue=specular, and alpha=colour change (ie team colour). Ignore the key in the shader for multipurpose maps, I believe that's what they used for xbox.