(to devs) md2 vs md3

[Mr.Floppy]

I was thinking of something like (I've seen this in other games) having a "mapmodels" folder in the textures folder(*) and using a command in the model's cfg like "loadskin textures/mapmodels/barrel skin.jpg"

Have you tried whether the loadskin command would work like that. Like the barrel2 model will load the barrel(1) skin from it's folder?

If that worked (I doubt somehow, as usually it only scans the actual folder for files) removing the redundant skin file won't be a big deal. Though, I haven't thought through all aspects about this yet, to be honest.