@CA99 thanks for your answer
First has already been covered: I don't know if even 1k textures are needed for many small environmental/background objects. I've been able to get a good amount of detail out of a 1024^2 texture for a wood pallet by a single repeat, but the result is very detailed and the normal map does a lot of the heavy lifting.
Currently the idea is a bit different of what regular games do.
STK will mainly have two kind of texture.
* High quality 1k or 2k Generic textures (like wood, metal, etc) they can be tiled seamlessly.
* Detail map used by single object to provide the color, and some details (like vegetation over the wood texture). They depends on the size of the object and its importance in tracks.
So we can use the high quality generic grayish wood texture for the grain elevator (the red building in harvest) and add another layer on top, the detail map that will provide the red painted surface, and other things like ambient occlusion.
So even a small object in the background can use a high detailed texture since the texture is already used by another object close to the camera.
In your example we will use two textures. The generic 2k wood texture + a palette detail texture, maybe 512 will be enough to provide things like bolts or moss growing in an old palette.
For complex objects like characters and karts, I'm all for having 2048^2 textures. Terrains may need up to 4096^2 for their color map, and obviously, terrain is pretty important for something like STK. Terrain however, requires a complex system of texture layerings, masks, etc., and I'm not really sure how artists create it in 3D modeling software without using special tools.
In comparison of other games stk characters are very small in the screen. So 1k (1024) may be enough. For the terrain we will use generic textures +
a splatting map (probably what you call a color map).
Sadly splatting is a very costly effect so we can't use raw 2048 splatting map. But I'm looking for some trick to avoid the problem and to fake a higher resolution.
The lighting experiment looks fantastic so far. I'm wondering if we'll see dynamic shadows, soft-edge particles, SSAO, normal/specular maps, and other modern shader effects soon? Although the latter (normal/specular mapping) is more work on artists, and I think we'd do well to focus on graphical features that don't require that much more artists' work first.
* Dynamic shadows are a planned feature. But obviously it's not an easy thing
* GPU soft particles are done. But it's still WIP.
* SSAO is done. Used in both demo (harvest & mine)
* Normal mapping and specular mapping is done. We already use specular map in the mine (unfortunately not all texture), but sure it's available. Maybe I will have a way to generate them automatically
* There is also a list of planned features.
Even bad models and game art don't look so bad when situated with good lighting effects
Unfortunately it's not the case. The vast majority of our objects have issues with normals, etc. So even with all theses fancy effect the result is pretty bad (since these algorithms need a right normal value).