New objects do need new textures in order to be usable, but that's not necessarily a bad thing inherently; I'm not participating in MOAR in part because I just don't have the time, but I think new textures are critical; we should be looking at stuff like diffuse, specular, and normal mapping now if I recall correctly, which means that the vanilla textures ain't gonna cut it anymore. Add in the fact that trying to keep the old textures is borderline impossible from a modeling/UV perspective, and I'd say that it'll actually be less work to start anew than try to maintain 1:1 compatibility.Improved models with custom-made textures (improve the geometry, change the unwrap)
*snip*
Con:
- New models need new textures in order to be usable
- There will probably be a need for more textures (new geometry demands additional 2d art)
- Coordination between modelers and texture artists, depency of models and textures
- Organization, coordination and progress of the project will require more work
- We could more easily drift off from vanilla Morrowind's look & feel
- No compatibility with already-existing texture replacers
- We might quickly accumulate a huge amount of textures, many of them huge compared to the originals = performance hit
- ...
More textures and new textures are basically the same; you probably won't need numerically more textures, though you may need to expand the texture space (again, not a huge problem).
You will need modelers and texture artists, but fortunately I don't think that that's particularly more difficult than the current coordination between modelers. And yes, it will probably take a little longer to release, but it'll look much better when it does.
See above on the more work on organization (though hopefully the software manages most of that).
I recognize that drifting from vanilla's look and feel is bad, but you kinda want to in some ways anyway, namely making things more high fidelity. I wouldn't complain too much.
If people wanted other texture replacers, they could use them with vanilla models. I don't know that there are any texture replacer/third-party models that don't need to be matched up anyway. I believe that we've had the texture replacer debate here, and the general consensus was that any thing we particularly liked as a whole community never saw a complete release.
I wouldn't worry about performance issues from replacing textures and such; sure it is a performance hit but a lot of our performance issues right now come from OGRE; by the time they get dealt with in OGRE the optimization will outweigh the resulting doubling or tripling of texture resolution. Modern systems should be able to deal with it as a non-issue. Given how Morrowind currently treats rigs, it looks to me like geometry is more important than textures right now anyway, but I'm not a master at such diagnoses.