A start on the .MESH file format

[Caliban]

Those screenshots you posted Casuir look like the envmap (cubemap) at full strength. If you turn the unit's normal map alpha to white, you will get the same effect. When we create meshes in 3dsmax, we also specify the material shader per lod. Each lod has it's own shader so we can control the amount of pixel/vertex shaders on each lod for performance reasons. When these are set, shaders are turned down or off depending on the distance lod.

I have sent a bit of info off to our programmers to find out more about the mystery data.