For those of you who are confused, here is a basic shader that you can use to get your foot in the door for physically based shading. As you can see, it doesn't even cost much more instruction count wise then the dreadful default phong shader. To make it easy to implement and re-use I suggest you do as I did and implement…
I'm sorry, but that is still backwards. Just because some people are still handling their textures that way, doesn't mean it's the correct way of doing things. That procedure is typical of ad-hock lighting models. If you are using a normalized specular model (which you should), then your specular map is going to represent…
Gloss/Roughness maps aren't used more because simply put, artists sometimes are too lazy to mask specific areas of a mesh that represents a certain material and try and work it out in their target render engine the value and how it will look. It's much easier to make a Spec Map (Cavity, AO, Diffuse, Normal formula, etc)…