all i want is to use different normal maps for different entities.. not differnt ones per the same models...see. maybe your script already can do that..but i dont see how. I dont want to define differetn materials for each model.. just use the same mat_diffuse. How does it know which model/skin gets which normal map?
instead of defining skin2=<wahtever.tga> as the normal map.. how do you make the shader know to use differnt normal maps .. maybe im being dense.. thank you for your patience.
my first example does exactly that. it uses the second texture (which you assigned in med) of the current model as normalmap. don't assign skin2 in the material.

Code:

---

action ball // the action of your entity

{

  //bmap_to_normals(bmap_for_entity(my,1),16); // you don't need this line if you already generated the normalmap with an external tool

  my.material=mat_diffuseperpixel;

  ...

}



material mat_diffuseperpixel

{

  flags=tangent;

  effect=

  "

    texture texSkin1;

    texture texSkin2;

    matrix matWorldViewProj;

    matrix matWorld;

    matrix matWorldView;

    vector vecSkill41;

    vector vecFog;



    technique diffuseperpixel

    {

      pass p0

      {

        Texture[0]=<texSkin1>; // colormap (texture 1 of 2 in med's skin editor)

        Texture[1]=<texSkin2>; // normalmap (texture 2 of 2 in med's skin editor) make sure you use a 24bit tga bitmap

---

.........
sub r10,v0,c16 // lightdir=vertexpos-lightpos

this line should be:

sub r10,r10,c16 // lightdir=vertexpos-lightpos

i corrected this 5 minutes after i posted the code but you were faster!
if the model space vertex position gets used, the light direction won't be correct. but in the current beta this doesn't matter much. the light direction will behave strange anyway because of the wrong normals...

the amount of the hightmapping?.. yeah eitehr contrast on the hightmap/normal map or i think there is a way to bias the dotproduct.. but i dont know the assembly
i don't think you should manipulate the normalmap in any way (for example giving it more contrast). the normalmap's normalvectors won't be well behaved (normalized) anymore. the photoshop and gimp plugins provide amplification parameters which get used when the bumpmap gets converted to a normalmap. you should do it this way. if you convert the bumpmap to normalmap with bmap_to_normals you can scale the bumps with the second parameter.

im not a programmer.. just artist..
i am more artist than programmer too!