Since this thread has been dredged up (which is a good thing), I should point out
this post on the first page. A year ago, I was talking about the abstract possibility of “fully usable shader support”. Now we’re basically there. In 1.70, you can specify
specular mapping, glow mapping and illumination mapping without even using a custom shader. There’s one niggling little feature stopping normal mapping and parallax mapping (like bump mapping only better) from being on that list, and that’ll be in 1.72 (probably not in 1.71, though).
In short, if you’re still designing textures as a single blob of colour (a diffuse map) especially if it has “baked-in” lighting effects, stop it. That approach is obsolete. If your ship has spotlights shining on the hull, use an illumination map. If it has glowing lights, use a glow map. (If it has both, and the spotlights are white, you can use a combined glow and illumination map to save memory.) If it has areas of varying shininess, which most objects do, you should be considering either a specular map or using multiple materials with different specularity settings. (The latter will work even with shaders disabled.)
It’s a brave new world and all that, but it’s time to start carping the diem. (Of course, some practical examples using the effect map attributes might be useful. Perhaps these can be provided by the community? *glances at Griff*)