After doing some research, I've only seen Normal Maps mentioned for Unity. Is there any support for MonoGame / XNA? Our game uses 2D Spine Characters in a 3D world, and while I've been able to get basic lighting working I was hoping to implement normal maps to really sell the idea of them being in the 3D world.

I think I already know the answer to this from looking through the render code in SkeletonRenderer.cs and MeshBatcher.cs but figured I would ask in case I was missing something.

And as the follow-up questions, assuming that normal maps are not supported, what are your thoughts on the path of least resistance to adding it? I see two possible options:

1) The "proper" way - adding actual normal map support into the runtime code. This looks like a hefty chunk of work, including updating the MeshItem class to carry a second Texture2D, ensuring it gets set in a similar fashion to the base texture in MeshBatch.Draw, making sure these textures are assigned to and set in the SkeletonRenderer, making sure it's supported in the Atlas page, etc. I also would need to do some work to ensure I can get tangent information.

2) Do a runtime implementation without altering any Spine code - something like what is described in this Gamasutra article when it talks about lighting Monkey Island: https://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/OliverFranzke/20140828/224326/Dynamic_2D_Character_Lighting.php
This definitely seems like the easier path but would require more processing during runtime.

Any thoughts or insight is much appreciated!

Thanks for the confirmation. I will probably be messing around with this in a couple of months as I have some other unrelated tasks that take priority, but if I get it up and running at any point I'll be sure to post up some examples in case it would be helpful to anyone else.