Thanks - I had just found no way (so far) to use more than 2 textures, so I didn't wnat to spend 'a million years' making uber-detailed models that wouldn't show up that well.
I have some decent textures for tiling, like chainmail and fabrics as well as more generic seamless noisy effects, so extreme closeups can look good.
My question about the double normal-mapping was whether I need some fancier math (since 'zero' is pure blue, so adding two forward-facing pixels would get 510), is there an existing shader to take care of it, or is it easy enough to do?
May your real death be as cool as your best game death, and take a hell of a lot longer to get to
Dave Heinemann