Normal/bump mapping

I've been working on getting normal and bump mapping to work in our game so that we can use lower poly models but still have a nice polished looking game. The problem is that XNA's BasicEffect class doesn't support normal maps, so we're going to have to write our own shader.

I've been trying to figure out if there's any way we can use the BassicEffect for everything but the normal map. I don't want to have to write a shader that handles everything about the rendering process, but I'm starting to think it would be less work to just go ahead and do so.

Also, I've been trying to generate some decent normal maps for the current ship we're using to test the code, but I'm having trouble understanding Maya's process for creating normal maps. I think I finally figured it out last night, so we'll see.