EDIT: Also did anybody contact Toady about this. I saw a comment by him recently (possibly the June report) about not being able to implement something because he did not know how the graphics system worked. Could be that all this awesome work might be something he would like to pick up?
I think you refer to this:
Toady, how hard do you think it is to implement the fourth thing the in eternal suggestion voting (Full graphics support) and how high is it in your priority list?
Will we be able to use graphic sheets for plants like we can with creatures at some point?
As far as I know, implementing things like item or map tiles won't work without multiple texture atlases, or something, and I don't know how to do that in the new graphics code.
The most straightforward way would be for the game code to draw the map using internal tile types, plus supply some kind of material color, or code, and maybe have a default translation table from tile types to font/tileset characters somewhere in the raws,
or give it somehow to the graphics code. Then leave actual translation to the renderer plugin, which will be free to load additional graphics and whatnot.
Currently it does that conversion from tile types to characters internally, which results in the limits that can only be overcome with dfhack methods, and that would be slow and cumbersome.
In fact, there's a prototype of just such renderer I wrote before starting work on this modular stuff. Link's in the signature.
The hardest part I think would be persuading Toady that he doesn't need to do everything himself, and that he won't lose any control that way.
The whole idea with pluggable renderers is to separate game from graphics, so that Toady can be sure that no matter what he changes in the game, he won't need to touch graphics side, and existing graphics code will continue to work, and on the other hand, that graphics code can be updated without any need for Toady's attention, much less for recompiles or, Armok forbid, any modifications to the game code.