Well I am going to chip in here.
There is only so much you can do with a texture atlas, to say the least I feel it is causing me more frustration than any thing else.GG doesn't support, creating primitives, and it will never support it as the moment it does, users will be less reliant on the store and content that TGC provides, this causes to what seems to me an ethical issue on part of TGC.Money vs functional software for a much broader audience.
Secondly we aren't living in the stone age any more graphics memory is exceeding 2gig on entry level cards, and very likely in a year or two we should be seeing entry cards with 4 gig or more.There is honestly no reason why GG can't support multi textures, there really is none, other than purposely removing the ability from the software.
While TGC may have honest intentions of removing it for the benefit of other users with less powerful graphics cards, the high end/ mid range guys, are left in the dark again.I shouldn't have to remind TGC of the issues where the high end guys actually suffered with performance issues and graphical issues as a direct result of focusing on getting GG to run on weaker systems.While this may be a delicate balance of graphics vs performance, TGC is paying the ultimate price for their train of thought, just having a look at steam reviews, bar the one liners.
It's evident that there is a considerable push for better graphics bar the complaints of performance.I have mentioned before TGC needs to draw line of what it is willing to support based on system requirements, while it may seem like a hard choice, there really is a limit, and expecting to support every CPU and graphics card is just going to end badly for TGC.
While TGC has keen eye on performance and graphics, and paying a great deal of attention to what users want of the engine, artists creating content for GG is pretty much left out to fend for them selves, unfortunately it is getting a little tiresome, it's just excuse, excuse after excuse when it comes to multi textures.
A 1024x1024 full mip RGBA DXT5 texture is ~1MB in size, meaning you can add roughly 256 textures of 1024k x 1024k, 2k textures use about 4mb.When using multi texture on a model you would be less reliant on higher size textures as you can get away with a lot of smaller textures. Arguments has been made, the issue is draw calls. ?
Has any amount of effort been done to address and reduce the performance impact of draw calls, honestly stone walling the issue and not supporting artists better in general has it's limits I know of a fair amount of artists that have all but given up, due to the restrictive nature of GG, it isn't fair.
What I would like to know when is TGC going to offer the guys creating content for GG, better support and the things they need to be more productive, multi textures is a step in the right direction, but hardly sufficient progress these guys need in the long run.
While this post is a bit on the aggressive side, it is showing my general frustration on lack of artist support. TGC needs to come to the table and speak to artist as well and see what they need, it's all a bit one sided at this point.
Win7 pro, Intel 2500K @3.7ghz 660GTX 8gig ram 16tb HDD