𝘾𝙇𝙂 SimpleFlips

it's considered cheating to alter the texture work of a game using video plugins and calling it a romhack

Fair enough, this is a mod either way. The level was designed specifically for the hires textures. I build the whole castle and grounds so that part is a Rom Hack anyways. There is no other way to import prerendered lighting like this.

Except maybe doing the same as here but with 700 textures, and vtx'lighting It is possible, you just took the easy aesthetic approach But that's not inherently wrong, so don't worry much. Just please avoid misnaming so you can also avoid confusion

You think 1 week of custom modelling, 2 UV maps for every object, 3-4 hours of render time, 3 further hours manually fitting and testing 19 2048x2048 and 4096x4096 textures and then manually placing the trees and items is the easy way out?

Oh yes. (Relatively, of course) Because the same could've been done with 32x textures.

Making a single 4096x4096 image would require 16384 32x32 textures. I'd expect the engine is less capable of loading that than a single 4096x4096 texture. Also, that number of images multiplied by 19 counts as impossible. This is what we call the only Viable method.