You are talking about per pixel lighting, right? There is no way to do normalmapping without per pixel lighting as that is all normalmapping is about...
That was my assumption, but they don't seem to react to the map lighting...I have not tinkered anymore since this post....I may have gotten confused(vec light...versus ambient light)...I will play with "killing" the ambient light and see.
well, the normal map shader I am currently using must be taking a shortcut somewhere, while it does take into account local lights placed by script...or hand..it does not care about camera.ambient or vec_Sun_xxx(meaning sunlight in general)...I will visit the wiki and check one out there...I'm possibly using a rather old one....I've had it forever...before asm even...(joking).
Yep, all the shaders have some form or level of ambient somewhere.... I set sun_color.red,green, and blue to 0 and things are still lit(that use a normal mapping shader. I then adjusted the VIEW*.ambient, in this case the standard "camera.ambient" I set it from 0 through -100 and no change. the shaders all reacted to point lights though...I will look at shade-c, it is the only one I did not look into...