Great work TDW! I was concerned that the shader change would mess with other, regular ships, but nice to know it's only for the dat ships.
You know I did some progress too!
I think I have eliminated the illumination bug/anomaly! I can use high LOD values, guns are rendered and the lighting is good! Ships take damage and it's seen underwater.
I did few things:
1. Used SH 4 stock Normal Map (I think there may be something wrong with our maps)
2. Assigned one (and only one) material to DMG_col-nodes. It seems the material has to be the last of the list in dat-file. The one that has no cfg#TXR text, but just a "1" or "2".
But yeah! We can take some of those Bad Things out of the list!
Try it out when you have time! And shouldn't you be sleeping at this time? Here is beautiful morning already!