Well...reading this thread, I could'nt stay without replaying.
The first thing that I have to say is that Gezere is basically right in his opinion:
nowadays, all shapers and painters ( me included....the first autocriticism is for me ) , beside the joy and amusement on making new cars and high quality textures, are living a sort of competition on GP4 sites....and this is true.
The first improvement for all GP4 users should be the stop to this sort of competition.
Indeed,everyone wants to make the best car...and therefore, everyone is making, yaer by year, cars more detailed, and more heavy in kbs. The same discussion could be made for textures, where, in my opinion, painters lost in a major level the right dimension, because, honestly, 2048 textures are perfectly not useful for GP4, and they increase dramatically the PO work.
On the other hand, actual cars, as I always said, are often missing in real, good lower lods....So, if You start from a lod 0 of 1100 kb ( or more ), You can't pretend to offer fake lower lods ( specially 1 and 2 ) that are basically the same lods 0. This happened in 2005 for several cars.
I want to tell an anedoctal story, the showed me how different is the philosophy between the GP4 world , and F1 Challenge world game, for example.
Last summer, when I finished my ferrari F2005 ( I finished the first model in May..), I had no painter for this car...after some attempt from the first painter of my team, in September my car was still without livery. Therefore, I offered my car to Rulph Hummerich ( You probably know him, or remember this name ), in my opinion one of the best painter for F1 games ( and personally, a really good friend ).
Well, when Rulph saw for the first time my car, he gently asked to reduce the poly dimensions. From about 1080 kb ( 18000 polys ) I made a new model of about 900 kb ( and about 13000-14000 polys ). He said this car was crazy in polycount, since for EA games ( F1 Challenge ) good cars are about 5000-6000 polys. Therefore, although grateful to me, He gently refused my car.
This is only to say, back to topic, that all new cars for GP4 should be made " cum grano salis " ( latin )...I think, as someone said, that an accurate engine-damage model, or a lot of tiny, small particulars on cars, are good for....renders, but not for the game. From this standpoint, GP4 is becoming an elegant plattform for nice renders. But when you speack about the game...when You speack about playing, I think that good cars could be surely at maximum of 8000-9000 polys, and should have real lower lods.
Regarding textures, I think that for playing, also the "old" 512 x 512 textures were right ( See for example MOD 2002 by GP4 Italia ), but probably the more right size textures, considering actual PC machines, could be 1024. But don't pretend to use Super high textures 2048 ( specially for many cars ) without affecting your Pc performances.
And I use a 3800 ghz PC, with GeForce 7800 GTX.....but this is not a good motive to propose "super heavy "updates for GP4.
Finally...dear friends: this is only my opinion.
I respect the point of views also of other people that prefer high quality textures, and high polycount cars, since probably these files represent an evolution of old GP4 files, and the actual, standard level of PCs can support these kind of GP4 updates.
Best regards.
Nicola