I dont think pp and normal mapping would mix. But I am VERY noob to shaders.

BTW, forgive me if Im wrong, I havent seen your code in ages, and I am only
new to shaders, But didnt your old code create a separate material for
EVERY entity and all those materials have the same shader?
Couldnt you just greate a single global material with the shader, and assign the
global material to ALL the entities(at ent_create time)?
Or am I missing something fundamental?