Would be nice to have a refraction shader that uses normal maps for the refraction deformations.

Yes, that would be super!

you have a tutorial for normal map shader, and a tutorial for refraction, so you can combine them both together (when having license)

hmm.. havent noticed a normal map shader tutorial.. have look in to that.

shaders\09 - Advanced Shaders in Solid Render Mode.cpp

okay so.. ive been trying to create this shader by combining those two.
its proving to be quite difficult but here's what i got so far.




The image is a bit dark but you can get the point from this one.
There is a plane with normal map and backbuffer as diffuse color.
the problem is that the same plane is also rendered to the back buffer as black.
is it possible to get rid of this somehow?

aren't you rendering the black plane too many times?
you should draw it only once in RM_BLEND, check the refraction tutorial, the skeleton model is drawn only once.

well i don't know how to get from the refraction tutorial to rendering normal maps while rendering in blend mode.
i started from the advanced solid shader tutorial and added the backbuffer to that color.
ended up with this problem.

you should use the blend mode refraction tutorial, and to it, add only normal map support from the advanced shader tutorial.
copy only stuff related to normal maps (tangents, binormals, normal map access, ...)

well ill have to try that.. they are just so hard to understand because they use so very different methods.. and i just suck with shaders.. but ill let you know how it progresses.