
Trust me, the DirLights are the key to eliminating your characters' appearance being dark or black. Keep working with them. It took me a long time to figure out how to position them, and what properties to set, in order to get things looking right.
If you have FastLightObjects set to True on your DirLights, change them to False. Set the ObjectBrightScale to a higher value, like 4.
Also, check the settings of the World Processor when you compile your maps. It should look like this . . .
Make sure those lighting boxes are checked. If they're not, it would explain why your characters look dark no matter what you do.
As for not having any prefabs, it sounds like you don't have DIRTYPEPREFABS files in your prefab folders. If you copy and paste this text, and save it as a batch (.BAT) file, you can run it and it will create the necessary files to get DEdit to recognize the prefab folders.
echo. > "x:\YourTronDir\Game\PREFABS\GLOBAL\INTERACTIVE\DirTypePrefabs"
echo. > "x:\YourTronDir\Game\PREFABS\GLOBAL\STATIC\DirTypePrefabs"
echo. > "x:\YourTronDir\Game\PREFABS\GLOBAL\STATIC\DATABLOCKS\NEW_BLUE\DirTypePrefabs"
echo. > "x:\YourTronDir\Game\PREFABS\GLOBAL\STATIC\DATABLOCKS\NEW_RED\DirTypePrefabs"
echo. > "x:\YourTronDir\Game\PREFABS\GLOBAL\STATIC\DATABLOCKS\NEW_YELLOW\DirTypePrefabs"
echo. > "x:\YourTronDir\Game\PREFABS\GLOBAL\TRIGGERS\DirTypePrefabs"
echo. > "x:\YourTronDir\Game\PREFABS\M01\SKYBOX\DirTypePrefabs"
echo. > "x:\YourTronDir\Game\PREFABS\M01\STATIC\DirTypePrefabs"
echo. > "x:\YourTronDir\Game\PREFABS\M02\INTERACTIVE\DirTypePrefabs"
echo. > "x:\YourTronDir\Game\PREFABS\M02\STATIC\DirTypePrefabs"
echo. > "x:\YourTronDir\Game\PREFABS\M05\SKYBOX\DirTypePrefabs"
echo. > "x:\YourTronDir\Game\PREFABS\M05\STATIC\NEWGAMEGRID\DirTypePrefabs"
echo. > "x:\YourTronDir\Game\PREFABS\M05\STATIC\NEWGAMEGRID\UNDERGROUND\DirTypePrefabs"
echo. > "x:\YourTronDir\Game\PREFABS\MULTIPLAYER\DirTypePrefabs" |
You'll have to substitute the x:\YourTronDir part with your own Tron 2.0 directory.

