ooh, yeah. I forgot about the bright glow bug fix. that's another one that gets on your nerves.
the problem with blanking alphas means you have to go in and recreate the alpha channel from scratch. some ships need that done, however, to catch stray bits that got away in the initial making of. I used the Void set to occasionally check a ship's Alphas. the hardest part of recreating an alpha is redoing the registry spots and so forth.
ZZ's ships have soft, subtle glows to them that can make you wonder if they even HAVE any. then there's ships like the Promellian that actually HAVE alphas on them, but they're not lit. I went over the promellians, and found that the channel was pretty much turned off in the conversion process. there's a strength level to alphas that needs to be adjusted in some cases.
speculars are another thing alltogether. some ship makers put a VERY subtle specular together, providing a very "matte" appearance. I believe this is how ZZ set up his speculars when doing the ships above. I have the accuser myself, and have done some tweaks to bring the appearance up, mostly by rebooting the speculars for the ship.
a little goof to watch out for concerning speculars is that some ships were given a specular, but the author forgot to remove the Alpha Channel first when making them. this will leave the specular effect underneath ONLY the alpha layer areas. this is noticeable on ships with a lot of registry spots at the right angles.
