Regarding the blurriness, it's because the G3D viewer is limited to very basic texture filtering (basically, how textures are modified when viewing them at an angle). I'm not sure what exactly, but probably bilinear. MegaGlest itself defaults to bilinear and can support trilinear filtering, though trilinear isn't that much of a difference. Anisotropic filtering would make a huge difference, but might be difficult to implement (not sure; on one hand, the algorithms are well defined and already written, but on the other hand, I even understand the finer points of how it works). Not related to the MegaPack refit, just explaining the blurring.
At any rate, are we aiming for some level of texture detail in the refit? Units could easily use 512x512 textures. Beyond that for a single cell unit won't do much, though. Buildings, however, could use 1024 x 1024 and maybe even up to 2048 x 2048 textures before larger textures hit the point of severely diminishing returns (ie, no difference). However, outside of the game, larger textures could be very useful in media such as artwork or the starting video (I'd actually really like to redo that video when we're done with the mod, as it has a really rigid feel to it). What we could do is use large textures when creating models and then downscale them to an appropriate size for in the game. So we might model our spearman with a 1024 x 1024 texture, but in the game, it'd use a 512 x 512 or maybe a 256 x 256 texture. Whichever we feel gives the most "bang for our buck". The larger texture could be an option for use in other media. Of course, that could make unnecessary extra work for modelers, so I wouldn't intend to enforce it. Just an interesting idea if the modeler feels up to it.
But any way, while we're on the topic of textures, I do think we need some standards. In particular, I propose we use PNG images for ALL textures. There's no reason to use TGA or BMP textures, since PNG has the same level of quality while being a smaller file size and more supported format. JPG is cool, but we have multiple people working on this project, so I'd imagine we'd see some people editing textures made by others. That means that if we use JPG, that lossely encoding is going to work against us, since the image quality would be decreased every time we save the image.
Furthermore, I'd like to propose that all textures MUST have a resolution that's a multiple of 2 (for example, 512 x 512, 1024 x 256, or 64 x 64). The reason for this is that some (old) graphics cards apparently have issues with non-power of two textures. While the people that are effected are a minority, there's really no disadvantage for using images that are a power of two.
I'd also like to take a look at how we'd do the XMLs. I think that due to how relatively easy the XMLs can be and how hard it is to have multiple people working at the same time on them, we should have one volunteer do the XMLs for a faction, then other members can go over them and discuss where they think changes should be. Obviously this means that to ensure the first draft is as good as possible, factions must be well planned out. That's currently looking quite good. At any rate, balance can be done by the individuals after the first draft is made (at which point it's much easier to collaborate). I do believe that MuwuM has started the XMLs for the Desert Nomads?
On a final note, multiple gameplay "leads" works well. We're all equals here, and the forum and Google Docs format make collaboration easy. We simply need to choose volunteers when tasks requiring a single person cope up (such as the aforementioned XMLs stage). Not to mention that when one person is busy or away, we have two others available for easy accessibility.
