@Nalates: A fair amount of Uru's lighting is baked into seperate "lightmaps", not so much the textures themselves.
For example, altering the lighting in the city prp files, will yield interesting results. Note, lightmaps are not all there is to it, but, ambient lighting values, etc, etc. I'm only just beginning to understand how Uru does this, but, its a concept I'm fairly familiar with. But, yes, while I'm sure some fan ages might directly paint on shadows directly onto textures, i've not really seen too many examples in Cyan's ages. And, yes, I've looked pretty closely at the texture files, its an interest of mine. =P There are some textures that are shadows, and are layered on top of the "standard" textures.
As for the licenses, no one can comment on that, as no one knows the licenses.
Changing the textures of uru in its open source incarnation definitely does NOT require the original photoshop files and the 3dsmax materials. I could do this right now with the existing uru content, with the tools we have now. We already have the UVMaps, anyways. That data is easily available. Hint: its contained in any model of Uru, and we can already extract them from the PRP files.
Shader improvements would be very nice indeed. It *would* require updates to the ages for any real benefit, but, to be honest, this should be one of those things that we should be doing, in my opinion. I also agree on Paradox' "good and bad bloom" lets not overdo it, people.
But, all in all, a graphical facelift would certainly be very, very nice indeed.
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