(to Devs) Unique folder for mapmodels textures

[tempest]

[...] This shouldn't work with relative paths. Does it?

I'm not sure if it does, but it should, and otherwise it should be fixed. For everything the engine loads, it checks in the home directory first, then in any additional package dirs, and only then in the installation itself.

@ Mr.Floppy & tempest, I guess you will need to see the revised package to fully grab the simplicity of the whole process and the benefits.
[...]
See also the particularity of this system, one could even create mapmodels using textures from several image files in the 'skins' folder, or even the gastank's base using bridge.jpg, in brief the possibilities are vast.

Well, I don't know, but IMO it just makes more sense to keep things together that belong together, e.g. model and skin.
An idea would be to use a more specific structure for models which share a skin (and therefore are probably similar in other respects as well), if they already exist. Like this:

[SELECT ALL] Code:

mapmodels
>| benches
  >| bench
    |  md3.cfg
    |  bench.md3
  >| broken_bench
    |  md3.cfg
    |  broken_bench.md3
  |  skin.jpg

And you'd use it as md3skin "../skin.png". Otherwise, if you want to add such an additonal model later, you'd just put it into a separate broken_bench directory and use md3skin ../bench/skin.png And if you want to use the bridge texture on the gas tank, that would be possible as well.

About packaging zipped files will only have an extra 'skins' folder so I don't think that will create such a mess and in the case of a re-used skin the zip file will be even lighter.
[...]
Now regarding the auto download feature you guys certainly have pointed out a serious question but I don't know how it actually works so right now I cannot come up with a solution for this but I will get in touch with Luc@s to work on this (it works with other games so...).

The problem with this is how it currently works: it makes a first run to determine which packages (maps, sounds, textures, models) are missing. Then, it attempts to download them all. Once that has finished, it attempts to load all the stuff again, including what it just downloaded. With your setup, it would notice only now that the model textures are missing, so we'd need to add another break to download them.