I dont know much on the state of that shader at this current time, but i imagine it has been looked into and will hopefully be fixed in an upcoming patch

Area Lights do not currently support shadows, this is because it is extremely expensive to do correctly in real time especially without using some form of Ray Tracing, its something we have in mind but i dont see it being any time soon. As for the specular on multilayered materials, i believe this i...

Im glad you like the results, and you never know Crytek may hire me :) Also yes normally light values are dictated by the area of the light although there are ways around this for none area light by just providing it a low surface area, currently iv not linked it up to CryEngine's area light system ...

Over the past week, I have been hard at work adding a few features I felt would benefit a few of the project I was working on. The first one that I managed to get finished was physical light values include Kelvin temperature affecting the color and an option between Lumen and Candela intensity value...