Hi Crusoe, that's how it currently works. The new option also works this way, you get to specify a new direction but it is defined to be relative to the current view.

MoI uses a slightly unusual type of double-sided lighting to help reduce the amount of darkened areas in a scene. For example if you draw a sphere if you look at it you can see that there is a band of darkness only around the middle of the sphere instead of the back region of the sphere being totally dark.

This is pretty unrealistic lighting, but it helps to reduce the dark areas to smaller bands and shows off more contours of your objects.

- Michael