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...like the Card Guards from American McGee's Alice, or the Borg from Elite Force.

Is the problem that it can't be done at all, or that it can't be done legally?

If the games are GPLv2 then no problem. Anything else can't be done legally. As far as technical reasons go, models should be in the MD3 format. Both American McGee's Alice and Elite Force used the id Tech 3 engine as I recall, so they could be ported with little problems. However Alice might have animations which do not fit with OA. Both Elite Force and American McGees's Alice are commercial games and using models from them would be legally a very bad idea.

You should read older topics of this forum, and the DO NOT LINK[/b]) h t t p s : / / openarena . wikia . com]wiki (http://([b) (which has valuable infos like the roadmap and development related topics), to get familiar with OA before making suggestions, otherwise you ask (http://openarena.ws/board/index.php?topic=3318.0;topicseen) several (http://openarena.ws/board/index.php?topic=3319.0;topicseen) times (http://openarena.ws/board/index.php?topic=3320.msg27330#msg27330) to other members about issues you simply missed, which is a loss of time for everyone.

To answer you briefly, and from what I know :
- You could make maps "inspired" by maps from other games, but it's not a goal.
- Your weapons suggestions are welcome for a mod or another game, not for OA.
- Importing data from other commercial games is only okay if you own that game legally, and only you could use it as it's not redistributable. Moreover there is a format question for these artworks, if the engine of these games is IDTech3 then it should be technically possible to use them.

Alice doesn't use MD3, it uses .TIK

Infact, the only commercial game to use MD3 characters/players is Quake III Arena.

Plus importing non-Free material is just simply tasteless and the damn lazy thing to do.

That's surprising, since there are quite a few commercial games using id Tech 3.

I wonder why MD3 wasn't good enough, did they all want a skeletal model format?

You bet. Alice and FAKK2 are Ubertools based (extra enhanced scriptings and stuff for Quake3 that you could license from Ritual from 1999 to 2004), which had the skeletal TIK format for models. Elite Force used MDR which was actually a completed MD4 format (basically skeletal md3), and future Raven q3 titles from then on used their own glm/gla (Ghoul2) format. Medal of Honor: Allied Assault used Ubertools (TIK), and Call of Duty had their own skeletal model format.

I wonder if there are any persons that want to liberate ubertools, though it does come with proprietary stuff like MP3 and Bink decoding.

does anyone know what changes they made for return to castle wolfenstein?

the file extension says md3 but i guess there can differences anyway?

MD3 for weapons, static models and effects only. Their characters use MDO which is a wacky skeletal format also.

thanks!

Crap.

Would I be correct in guessing that you can't mix these different model types in one game, or convert models from one format to another?

Also, are there any games that use MD3 files but not the Quake III engine?

I can't name any! MD3 support isn't as widespread as MD2 in homebrew stuff.

And why is that? Is it because it takes a lot longer to make md3 models than md2?

No, it's because there was a site that had tons of MD2 player models, which encouraged lazy scavengry, and loads of MD2 loaders, viewers, plugins and tutorials just for that purpose.