The past two weeks I’ve been doing a lot of reading with regards to the specifications of the Quake1 (and Hexen2) MDL model format and the Quake2 MD2 model format. Mostly looking at where they are similar, where they differ and if there is any functionality missing in the one and extra in the other and vice versa as well as anything thats engine specific. I mostly relied on 3rd party spec papers as well as Quake1 and Quake2 engine/tools code to understand the structure of both formats.

Most of my time was spent decoding the MDL format and making sure that all data I load DOES make sense because theres no ways you can during the process know if you are doing it right or not, unless you are willing to spend the time to echo your results in a custom renderer to visualize the data. I’m too lazy for that type of effort.

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