ijed: as far as I know, there is no standard way to make a .mdl fullbright. It's just one of the differences in the way the two types of model get rendered, bsp have their own lighting info, and mdl use the map's light levels. I do think that medpacks looks pretty cool in .mdl format when placed in dark corners, it makes the lights blinking away on them really stand out.

Willem: You must at least make sure that you don't alter the order in which the frames occur without giving the user control over it. The actual names given to the frames in the .mdl aren't used by the engine/qc. It relies entirely on the enumeration of them in the order that they occur.

The $frame macros are simply a way of defining recognisable constant names for the numbers 0....n in a quick manner which only lasts for one qc file. The qc compiler has no knowledge of what the actual model file contains, so it just substitutes a frame number for each instance of $stand4 with a 3 - assuming that $stand4 is the 4th $frame that it encounters in the header.

So if your program loaded in ogre.mdl, reordered the frames into alphabetical order and then saved them again, the animations would no longer match up, so that would be bad. As long as you ensured that frames were exported in the same order they were imported, you would probably get away with it. But I suspect it would still be a desired feature...

(As a possible side note, people making qc files don't have to define the $frame things for every frame, they can just use the numerical indexes, or a mixture of the two. But just using the numbers can mean a lot of code has to be changed if you extend your first animation loop from 6 to 8 frames, so it's not encouraged to do that for anything with multiple sequences)