It's really difficult to make nice-looking high-resolution textures while still preserving the feel of the original, however.
See, I disagree. Someone who is talented in graphic design shouldn't have a problem making a dark, gringy, high-resolution tiled texture. I think most texture artists would squeal with delight at having the opportunity to make a more realistic-looking texture.
The problem here is that they used too many bright, sterile colors. People bitch about it a lot, but there's a good reason why Quake is full of brown, grey, and green -- it makes everything look dark, murky, and olden. The fact that id created such an environment using no more than 256 colors (only about 16 slots per color thanks to shading, I believe, with a few fullbright shades as well) and fairly small textures is commendable. There's no reason such a look can't be replicated with 16.7 million colors and hundreds of times the memory (Quake runs in 8MB of RAM, total -- video cards alone have 256MB+ on average nowadays).
There's similar debate with the project that's making high-res textures for Doom right now (Granted those look much better, if you ask me, albeit they don't preserve the original game's feel very well), people always feel that no matter what's done, it never really looks right.
I think that the main reason none of this looks right is because there are multiple people working on a single game, thus introducing multiple conflicting styles. Additionally, it doesn't seem as though any attempt is made to model the new textures after the old ones. The big brick textures in the screenshots that I critiqued looks overly modern, like something you'd find on a building made in the 2000s. It's simply not
supposed to look like that. It looks far too uniform to be in an environment such as Quake.
Either the texture artists are going to have to take creative license, which will probably piss people off, or they're going to have to have overly simplified textures, because there's only so much detail you can cram into a 128x128 flat (assuming that's what Quake uses, I haven't looked into it).
Quake, like Doom, uses a variety of texture sizes.
The texture designers aren't really limited to 128x128 or 256x256 or whatever anyway. I think the way most enhanced ports work is that they will draw a larger textures and scale the image down (i.e. if they replace a 128x128 texture with a 512x512 texture, it maps the 512x512 into the same area that the 128x128 texture was in, increasing the level of detail when you walk up close to the wall) so they have more room to squeeze tiny details. As for the broad view of the texture, they have no less room than id had when they designed the originals. Limits have been broken, not added.
Nine inch nails on my nail gun ammo box, i c wut u did thar.
Quake always had that. The new nail box texture just removes the subtlety by making the box look like it just dropped off an assembly line.
