I've spend most of today with writing my culling app that cross-references maps with asset packages (in this case .u) in order to get a list of what's unused in the package and that can be removed. It was already working to an extent before, but rewrote it slightly to be more flexible.
I then proceeded into running it on all maps and RevisionDeco, a package that contains all of our custom deco, most of which we've borrowed from TNM. There were a lot of things in there that I once imported that we've never used. I removed the unused things and took some time in moving all of the import code from all of the classes to a dedicated script (to ease moving the classes later). I managed to shrink the package from 27,9 to 8,5 MB! :D
Also spent some time here on moddb talking to people and of course on Skype with the team.
Right when I was about to go to bed I remembered that I could actually finish up with the improvement of fire-textures, basically tracking them down in the map, changing the flag from Masked to Translucent. Wrote up a simple script to run rcc.exe listbsptex on each map (dumping the result into files), then using Notepad++ to search in the files for "Fire". Most of the maps I've already dealt with, but found some more. Fixing those up as I write.
Tomorrow I think I'm going to take a look at the texture situation, organizing them all up in pretty packages.
Yeah, we should re-do all the fire effects with some proper resolution instead of how it is right now. The current fire-texture is 128x128, maximum current resolution of procedural textures are 256x256 and that might be changed in the future. However that requires us to sit down and learn how the procedural textures work so we can make pretty ones.
Changing from "Masked" to "Translucent" is the easiest fix and that will remove the horrible black edge around them and make them translucent like fire should be.