In Alekhine's Gun, the NormalMap textures cannot be viewed normally on PhotoShop and can only be viewed if you open them as a DDS file. It was like this in the demo as well. I checked with the people on the Dark Mod forums, they think it's part of the NormalMap and that the rest of the RGB format is hidden. How do I view the NormalMaps normally on PhotoShop?
Well, normal maps stored in "compressed" format. You will have to decompress them to make it look like regular normal map. There is only X and Y stored in DDS file. Z computed in real time.
Final normal will be:
Normal.X = TextureDDS.Alpha * 2 - 1.0;
Normal.Y = TextureDDS.G * 2 - 1.0;
Normal.Z = sqrt( 1.0 - Normal.X*Normal.X + Normal.Y*Normal.Y );
To convert back to regular normal map RGB values:
Pixel.RGB = Normal.XYZ * 0.5 + 0.5;