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I'm trying to figure out if OA supports animating mapobject models. I can't find any documented examples of it (I thought the fan in pxlfan would be the answer, but it's tied to a spinning brush)

I tried googling around but searching for anything regarding animation and OA/quake3 results in how to animate characters, which I have no interest in. I've got models exporting and the exporter seems to be holding the keyframes in the MD3 (exporting as .md3 and importing the .md3 again the animation still works in blender), but I can't figure out how to play them in game.

is it shaders? another file? an entity key?

Animated mapobjects? I don't think so, as the mapmodels AFAIK are baked into the BSP at compile time. The closest you can get is using a func_ entity (rotating, bobbing, etc) with a mapmodel.

That was what I was afraid of. Would it be possible to bring over W:ETs animating mapmodels in a future release? I Don't know how different their engine code is, but I know they're both open source and run on idtech3, and I know it has some spawnflag args that let you animate models. There's a spawnflag telling the game it animates, then you set keys for how many frames the animation runs and what FPS to play it at. You can even set a start point for the animation so you could probably have multiple animations on one model triggered by different events (haven't played around with it enough to see if this works)

I know development has kind of... ended but figured i'd suggest it as it would add a lot of life to the maps and might get a couple quake mappers to come over, as it's clear they're still out there (there was just a big quake 1 christmas map jam that finished)

Development is not finished (in fact, code updates are frequently in the repos) it's just that we're rebooting the assets (characters, maps...), ditching the uglier ones with better ones and that, coupled with the low manwork, is why there hasn't been a new version of OA in a long time.

Relevant links:
https://github.com/OpenArena/engine
https://github.com/OpenArena/gamecode
https://github.com/OpenArena/UI3

Also, most of the people who develop/play OA is also found on the Discord channel, which is why the forums seem empty.

As for new engine features, I'm afraid that falls into NOTTODO (there's a page in the old OA wiki called NOTTODO which specifies what falls outside of OA scope).

License conflict however.