hi and welcome !
We haven't worked with normalmapping yet, so there are no howto's specifically for iris, sorry =)
To use normalmap-textures , a shader is needed to apply the effect, i don't know much about shader programming, but it should be possible to find such a shader somewhere, there should be one in the ogre samples/demo apps. Or do you already have a specific shader you want to use ?
I think some of the samples/demos included with ogre use normalmapping, if you're interested in lowlevel material options / finetuning, they're probably worth a look, there are binaries for them included with the sdk for win/mac i think :
http://www.ogre3d.org/index.php?option= ... Itemid=131
(you don't need to compile, so which compiler version is not important)
(you probably best use the 1.4.9 version at the bottom of the page, as that is the one we currently use in iris)
ogre has material definitions in scripts editable by any text-editor, you can find documentation about it here :
http://www.ogre3d.org/docs/manual/manua ... C_Contents
depending on what modelling apps you use, you can probably directly export these .material scripts together with your model,
there should be exporters for most modelling apps here :
http://www.ogre3d.org/wiki/index.php/OGRE_Exporters
and here :
http://www.ogre3d.org/index.php?option= ... Itemid=133
due to the sub-optimal and complex animation system used by the human characters and clothing/armor, it's hard to replace them. Animals, monsters etc are much easier, you can find infos about how to replace them here :
http://iris2.de/index.php/CharacterModelOverride
a few infos about how to replace non-animated "static" models (furniture, walls...) :
http://iris2.de/index.php/Static_3D-Models
and here
http://iris2.de/index.php/Art
they're all in iris/data/models/ and subfolders
The models used by iris for characters and animals/monsters were not created by the iris team, but are rather loaded from original uo data (it had an official 3d client once, but abandoned), it's not possible to modify them due to legal reasons (copyright/owned by ea), but it's possible to replace models by completely new ones.
2. not yet, sorry. we'll add more camera modes and options as we find the time. (locked behind the char is a bit tricky, as it'd probably have to avoid moving the cam into buildings/trees/objects/etc automatically)
3. not sure what you mean ? what captain ?
if you mean the iris team :
http://iris2.de/index.php/Team