STATUS

I'm basically just throwing in OpenGL into rm2k3, so yeah, texturing should be very possible.

There would be a number of ways to do that, but that won't change how things are dealt internally in the rm2k3. This means you would still have to use charsets, tilesets, etc. with the same colour depth as always, since that's the only thing the maker knows how to draw, and trying to disable that is pretty much out the question.

So the most viable option would be to do some kind of replacing strategy, and then add some code in a plugin to render to the screen in full 24 bit color depth ( or even 32, if you fancy the transparency ). Dunno what the best way to make this user friendly would be though, and to a large part, it would mean redrawing the entire screen, which "could" affect the performance. Emphasis on "could", as the mode 7 plugin seems to be remarkably performant, even with only rudimentary performance tweaks.

Another thing I've been feeling like looking into, is the options of increasing the resolution of the window. I already have a good way of getting all the map data I need to show tiles and sprites beyond the 20x15 tile limit currently given, but there could be tons of other problems arising from trying to do that, which I'm just not aware of at the moment as well, since I'm stretching what the rm2k3 was supposed to do. I've seen something similar done for rm2k without DynRPG though, so I have a feeling it might not be as farfetched as it could seem.

I don't need more color depth to mess around in OpenGL though, and this seems like it could be a good time to refresh and extend some of my experience with OpenGL.
... Of course, lot of fun stuff which I probably won't have time to do anything serious about until march or something, because things are getting hectic again.