Descent's original textures are small and flat, and the new renderer needs more than that: displacement mapping and lighting need to know for every spot of a texture how deep it lies, which way it faces and how shiny it is.

So all textures of Descent 1 and Descent 2 have been reworked. They have been upscaled, and each one has got a normal map and a map holding its height, ambient occlusion and specularity.

For robots, doors, lamps and walls the relief is based on hand made masks.

The textures are stored as PNG files now; DDS files are supported as well, and mods may still bring TGA files. A texture that comes without maps is simply rendered flat.

For those who want to make their own textures: started with the switch -exporttextures, D2X-XL writes the original textures to PNG files.