templar, its very interesting to know how you and your team solved certain problems.
our team is using almost the same approach with the models as ground.
this is what i got so far. i used wed to make a block and imported it into med to save it as .mdl i found out you have to use many small blocks for a greater model because if you just use a very big model made out of a large block in wed with only 4 edge vertices a6 displays small gaps between the models. so basically everything is based on a small wed block with a 256 texture on it. the biggest blocks made out of 4x4 of those small blocks use 1024 textures and we wont go higher than that. look here:
http://www.ackbytes.de/upload/pawned2.jpgdds textures are already available in the latest beta i think. we will use them, the only fear i have is that if i make a level out of those models i may end up haveing like 40 models with different 1024x1024 textures, 20 with 512x512... maybe thats too much?
can you remember how many different ground plates you had in one average level? you stated you did use 512-1024 so that would be pretty similar.
