You gonna join in man?
Sorry, got no spare time atm. 

I can prepare B&W textures for you guys, but you have to prepare a list of which one you need and WAD where I can find it. 

I'll post it in 10 mins once I've finished.... it's slow as fuck 

I'm afraid desaturation is not enough, add nice leveling to get some contrast. Otherwise it's too dark and grey = boring as fuck and light can't fix it.
Additionally after all this process it's a good idea to turn image to indexed color mode with Quake's palette and fixing unwanted fullbrights if necessary. 

which row should I lighten up then?

I think the original grey, black and white indexes should stay the same.

I was hoping we'd get away with leaving the palette as purely desaturated so that existing textures would translate nicely without strange bright patches. 

here are some desaturated palettes

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/108695968/palettes.zip

one quake format .lmp and the other .pal 

You are desaturating palettes, not WAD textures per se. I was talking about using standard palette but desaturating textures :) 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=km6bLtiSSq4 

To be honest, even if it is B&W, it is possible to highlight certain objects, for example placing white key (with effects white too) against fully black wall etc. I have been drawing my whole like B&W art, so highlighting is not rocket science.. but certainly it is not always is to execute if maps in this case varies a lot. It is a great challenge imo. 

"I have been drawing my whole life* B&W art." And that might be reason why there is so many grammar issues with my comments (time wasted on something else totally). 

I can't open lmp or pal files on TexMex, what those formats are? 

the .lmp is quakes format, should be able to be handled by most tools

the .pal is jasc format, also most quake handling tools should be able to deal with it.

the last version had a mistake, here is the current version: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/108695968/palettes.zip 

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/108695968/desaturated.zip 

As an fyi, the JASC .pal files are plain text files. It's a basically just a list of the RGB values for all the palette entries. 

Would it be possible to join with a map for id1? Or does it absolutely positively have to be for arcane dimensions 

but I don't think any id1 stuff is depreciated in AD, so provided you don't mind it being bundled with the AD stuff on release, then go for it. It should work just fine with the AD progs. 

If it works in id1 then it should just work fine in AD...I think? 

 

needs some intense white fog 

 

I tried to use a sky texture on a func_illusionary with an alpha value set to it around thigh height so it would look like a low layer of creepy fog....

it just renders as opaque and fullbright :( 

why not put a water texture on it instead? 

but the sky texture with the continual single direction movement looks better.... the water looks a little odd.

no matter... thanks for the suggestion :) 

Or pit the sky below the floor and make the floor texture semi transparent