Quake3World

Hey ppl! I'm creating new player models for Q3, but i'm curious about how the game reads the data files. By analyzing the existing weapons, i have noticed:

weaponName.md3 // Weapon model
weaponName_1.md3 // LOD 1
weaponName_2.md3 // LOD 2
weaponName_flash.md3 // Muzzflash model
weaponName_hand.md3 // No model, just two tags and those tags are animated

So, what's going on with the "_hand" animation here? How can i animate my weapon on the third-person and first-person view? Do i have to animate the tags? If so, how is this done? Also, what changes if i'm using IQM, now supported by ioquake? No more tags? Or same workflow?

I believe these are just the animations for when the player changes weapons. The tags indicate the position of the weapon relative to where the player's hands are supposed to be when dropping and changing the weapon models. I believe you have to animate the location of the tags though I'm not sure about the specifics on how to do this. You'll probably have to pour over some documentation and dig for old tutorials for this.

This is all there is in terms of official documentation:
http://icculus.org/gtkradiant/documenta ... manual.htm

Unfortunately, that's for players, no weapons. How does one animate the tags?

iirc the animations are hardcoded. i replaced weapons for a opensource project, and instead of having a lightninggun i build a minigun, with a spinning barrel pretty much like the original quake3 machinegun. without touching the code or animating the weapon the barrel just spins by attaching the barrel to the tag_barrel (or however it was called) in a similiar way the gauntlet worked.