Biggest Problem and Potential Improvements (Patreon)

As you know I'm working on graphic improvements for ETS2/ATS. Biggest point of the new improvements is new realistic lighting system.

But there is a problem with that, most of the game assets are (especially old textures) pretty low quality. Also none of them are using PBR textures (new lighting system) (even new assets do not have PBR textures, because game doesn't use PBR pipeline), which means we can't get the all the potential from new improvements.

I was thinking about replacement of trees, how to do that without changing anything from game files and with some automated system. The idea I got is creating Europe map painted with different tree species growing on these coordinates (to select which trees grow on specific coordinates in game easily). Then calculating the size of tree to select closest looking tree from trees I added. Thats a good system to replace trees etc.

But I was also thinking about something similar for the all map assets in the game, terrain/roads/buildings etc. So what I was thinking is creating some algorithms to read map data from game, run algorithms to select/create replacements for objects also add new objects. Its like map mods but Its going to change whole map (every country and assets) in the game from outside of the game.

So we can get actually all the potential from new improvements but also that means It wont be possible to use with other map mods because system is not going to use anything from game to render maps. I'm not going to create them manually, but probably I need to adjust a few things after algorithms created the whole map. It will be mostly automated system but also creating all of these algorithms and finding or making enough assets for each country is going to take sometime.

What do you think about it? Is it worth it? While I'm working on new improvements and testing, I see assets are holding back all the improvements because of low quality and because they are not PBR textures. Also I can use these algorithms in the future for other mods/plugin I'm going to make for other games or if I decide to make a game myself.

Also I'm open to any idea for possible solutions.