Well, I can tell you that the project might not be dead, but it was (and is) a tall order to undertake as a one man project. There are thousands of textures in the game, and most were done in a lazy manner. BTW, I'm the founder of this project. I'd almost completely forgotten about it, and I even signed up again on the site with this new account forgetting my original password. You may have seen a few peices of artwork I submitted in the Ocarina of Time HD community project of the three Poe Sister paintings that hang in the Forest Temple. Since I last posted on this project, my knowledge of software like Photoshop and Illustrator has improved vastly. I never produced anything by hand (hand drawn) and if I were to go back to it now, I'd probably disgard half the textures for not being up to a standard. The thing is, I know I could get the game looking fantastic, but the amount of time required to do that for the entire game is far too great. A game like Banjo requires a dozen or more people working on it. There are a lot of hand drawn textures which can be completely redone from scratch, but that requires capable artists to give up their time to do that, and redrawing each texture takes a lot of time. I wouldn't mind re-mastering a level in the game, like the haunted house for example, in the kind of HD textures found in the Zelda community project, just to see how well I could get it looking. I'll be building a new PC in the coming months, so maybe then.
Edit - just had a quick scan through some of the images I left in this thread. It actually looks better than what I remembered in some cases, and poor in others. For example, some of the textures that could only be re-done by hand painting were just touched up with one of the filters and sharpened and don't look near as well as they could do. The pumpkin faces on the walls in Gruntys castle for example. I also couln't do what I wanted to do with the icons on the screen. They too needed hand drawn, but I never had the proper means or knowledge at the time (mouse only).
