Fun to see people are reading my tutorial

The relevant piece of code from the shader is:
float4 Ambient = AmbientIntensity * vecAmbient;
As you can see, a vector with the ambient color is multiplied with a scalar value AmbientIntensity.
-AmbientIntensity is defined at the top of the shader, under "Tweakables". Make sure it is high enough (set it to 1 for just using the materials' ambient value)
-vecAmbient is automatically set by the engine, to the ambient color of the material. I'm guessing you didn't define the color in the material, in which case they are set to 0. Here is the material definition (c-script) from the demo:
Code:
material MtlNormalMapped
{
ambient_red = 64; // The ambient color.
ambient_green = 64;
ambient_blue = 64;
flags = tangent;
effect = "NormalMapped.fx"; // The effect file containing the vertex shader, pixel shader and technique.
}
If you have set both the AmbientIntensity and the material ambient to the values as shown in the tutorial, the model shouldn't be dark. If it is, please post your code and I'll take a look at it.
BTW, the shaders from my tutorial don't react to dynamic lights (only the sun). If you want to implement dynamic lights, take a look at "vecLightPos" in the manual.
EDIT: I just saw you said that you can see the skins if you fire a gunshot around them. That's strange, because the shaders don't react to dynamic lights. So I'm guessing you have forgot to apply the material with the shader to your model. See the chapter on including the shaders with A6 to see how that should be done. If it's the models that you don't want to use the shaders with that are too dark, just set the entity.ambient_red, green and blue to higher values and/or set the camera.ambient higher (note that the shaders don't react to the view.ambient, only the entities with no shader applied).