Hi Chums,
I've included this in the latest developmental build, but I think it may be disabled by default due to the need for some more tweaking. If you'd like to play with the specular highlights, you can enable the feature by enabling the the 'specular lighting' checkbox in the light mapping wizard (LM pane #2). The colour of the specular highlights is controlled by the 'specular' button on the light mapping wizard (LM pane #1). The specularity of each terrain type may be set in the material editor using the 'specular strength' edit box.
Please note that the specular lighting highlights here are not the same pretty specular lighting eye-candy that you may have seen in 3D engines, insofar as the highlights will not vary/move as the camera moves around on the terrain. If that is is the effect you desire, you will still need to implement it in your 3D engine, just as you always have.
Anyway, some more screenshots to explain what's going on:
This is a base texture map, with no lighting:
...and this is the regular light map:
The normal method to light the texture map is to modulate the unlit texture with the light map. The result is something like this:
Now, the new build of L3DT also calculates a 'specular light map', as shown below. This is calculated along with the light map, includes no diffuse lighting, and is calculated with a high exponent on the sun/normal dot product to simulate shininess.
If we add (not modulate) the specular light map to the texture after applying the regular lighting, we allow the light colour to overwhelm the texture colour on highlights, producing this more striking result:
For comparison, here is the texture again without specular lighting:
I hope we can agree that the specularly lit texture looks a little more interesting.
Anyway, once I finish tweaking the algorithm I promise to write a proper little tutorial on what the specular settings mean and how to use them. If you have any questions, please post them here.
Cheerio,
Aaron.