I love this icon. It ALWAYS looks like a smile to me! Yet, I guess it's not a smile. Hehe.

I wish I could help you out with textures but I can hardly keep up with my own designs :(

We could establish a team! 4 people would specialize on a single race each and the design decisions would be made here! This system would enable everyone to contribute regardless of their time constraints!

After that, we would upload our textures and put them on a single folder.
For example:
"New Texture Pack" (its icon could be a nice modified version of this):

Thank you!

"...that turned out to be a much larger wall of text than I expected..."

Don't worry, you were specific and organized, and that's fine!

“I have a system: there's a place for everything, everything in its place.”
―Wasabi

I think on most current PCs the game will only use the textures in the texture2 folder - I'm guessing this is due to either:
a. the game not detecting the amount of available graphics memory properly and automatically applying the "low" quality textures; or
b. the option to select texture quality being unfinished / missing in the released version of the game (with texture4 being a leftover).

To get the texture4 ones to show in-game they can be copied into the texture2 directory - replacing the original files (as they have the same filenames). Not all of the textures have a high-resolution version, which is why it's necessary to copy the texture4 files into the texture2 directory instead of just changing the folder names.

Here's a before / after comparison:
Default (texture2): https://i.imgur.com/gcP9pD2.png
After texture4 tweak: https://i.imgur.com/8jMZhsN.png

Editing the textures works the same either way - to make a higher resolution version of an existing texture you'll have to resize it to the desired resolution and work from there (use image filters and/or manually improve details), or create a new one from scratch (use the original as a reference).

I don't have Photoshop available to test this, but you should be able to save your edited textures as 24-bit BMPs as long as you have the image mode set to RGB Color before saving. If textures saved this way cause the game to crash, it might be due to Photoshop applying some type of compression or additional image properties that the game doesn't like - to work around this you could try copying the image out of Photoshop into another image editor like Paint.NET, and then save the file using that.

For the screenshots, I think the lighting might just be due to the map and time of day (Oasis with day/night cycle enabled - was late afternoon judging by the position of the sun in-game). My gamma slider in the options menu is set to about 25%.
Image quality-wise I'm running Machines at 1920x1080* with 32xS antialiasing forced through Nvidia Inspector and 16x anisotropic filtering forced through Nvidia Control Panel.

*The first time I ran Machines with my current setup I had it set to run in Windows 98 compatibility mode, and the game would only allow resolutions up to 1280x960. I tried running it without any compatibility mode enabled and the list of available resolutions in the options menu expanded significantly - allowing up to 1920x1080 to be selected.

EDIT: that turned out to be a much larger wall of text than I expected :p

Also, how did you manage to make your screenshots look so nice? The lighting/illumination is better (the ones I make look too dark/obscure).

e.g. here's my 256x256 interpretation of misshole.bmp: http://wiredforwar.org/uploads/files/upload-a86399f0-4ca4-45fb-afb3-85610cd5acae.bmp (saved using Paint.NET 4.0.4)

In-game comparison:
Original: https://i.imgur.com/Lts5RGJ.png
256x256: https://i.imgur.com/6lp9Rqw.png

If you want to improve or customise existing textures, I'd suggest using the higher resolution versions from the texture4 directory as the base.
If the texture4 textures aren't being loaded by the game you can copy the contents of the texture4 directory into the texture2 directory (overwriting the lower-res files) - make a backup first if needed.

I made the guide earlier than expected! :)

http://wiredforwar.org/topic/53/pisarz-news-status-other-stuff/2

Note: Remember to use the "texture2" folder.

This is the base texture that I made (it doesn't have to be a BMP):

I followed the same steps to change the red reapers' other textures:

"...and would also make it inaccessible)..."

So the game won't even open? Then, the new version of the original game (apart from O.M.) would be based upon original models but not on original code (or something like that)?

"...where could it say that it only accepts 8bit bmps?"

Hi! When you switch the file back to its original mode using Photoshop, it enables you to "choose" the amount of bits. The only option available is, effectively, 8 bits.

About the formats and other coding matters, I'm not currently qualified to give any useful suggestions. But I can do some research!

Update
(I'm also wondering. I remember a .bin (or a .strg?) file somewhere which has all the texture names in it. Perhaps that's the file that decides what .bmp files to load, perhaps it's possible to tweak it so that it accepts .pngs and such? or 24bit bmp's? hmm)

update
Just an idea, but where could it say that it only accepts 8bit bmps? In the model data?

update
Could it be possible to increase the bitmaps to 24bit by editing the models itself? Or is it loaded during a centralized point aka at launch?

Update:
I found something in the extracted .x files.

Things like

Material ID_2668 {
 1.000000, 1.000000, 1.000000, 1.000000;;
 0.000000;
0.000000, 0.000000, 0.000000;;
0.00, 0.00, 0.00;;
TextureFilename {
"fafA1_b.BMP";
}

which I found in agf2a35.x in \models\administ\boss\level2. What if we change these to PNG? (We didn't have a way to repack the .x files did we? hm)

Update: Isn't the .bin just a packaged file? If we remove the .bin file but copy back the packaged files in the correct place, doesn't that work?

@bilal
Well, it depends on which file you're using, even if it has the same name. Apparently the game requires the original file to be modified and not "replaced". I don't know much about the subject (about file formats), so I can't explain it. Anyway, now I know how to do it :)

Yeah, exactly. It was so long ago that I just pulled the images into paint and colored them differently.

I'll upload the guide after next wednessday!

@Pisarz Try double clicking on the layer as it is now locked because it's set as background. Doing that will make it a normal layer which should unlock all edit options for you.

I tried again with both the same file and another one. The attempt was unsuccessful. Yet, this could be due to one of the following possibilities:

• My version of Photoshop CS6 is portable. For example, I cannot load frames from a video to make animated gifs.
• The game's BMP files are not exactly of the same format as modern BMP files (is this even possible?).

Update:
I attempted to do this with Photoshop CS5 and the result is the same.
I suspect that the problem is related with the files and not with Photoshop.

Update:
https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/203/870923