probably bastion/marcher. 

would probably best be visualized with a lever, because you can immediately see that it has more than two states if touching it only moves it to the middle.

If you want to communicate that the button is unavailable for a certain time after it has been pressed, you should also keep it in the depressed state until it is available again. That is pretty clear I would think. 

Has three state buttons and Quake itself does as well 'while pressed' for both. 

Unpowered is a state that you don't get in standard quake, yeah. I think the tristates would be more understandable in practice though, because you'd see a reaction (or not). The unpowered button would be inert until some external force turns it on, it doesn't move when you press it (you might need a text message when they try to push it like "Looks like you need to activate this first...").

Once it's been switched on, the brighter colour and animation should attract your attention back to it, and now it just works like any other quake button. You'd learn what the final colour mean by using it, the colour at the same time that the button moves - in response to the player using it. It then returns to the middle colour once it has moved back out, which is a convention players already recognise.

If you were using it as a direct substitute for quake buttons you'd probably just choose two of the frames you like and swap between them, so you might go with unpowered and ready (a la "+1mtlsw" buttons) or ready and activated (a la "+1base" but in medieval). That stuff about the animations was more thought-process waffle than actual expectation of how the player would understand the visuals....

If you only need two colours, you can also use the combination of "unpowered" and "activated" - the interpolation between them will not pass through the colour inbetween. Then again at that point you might also just edit the skin, and get the more preferable pulse animation. 

the colour changes at the same time that the button moves 

I said I was going to make up for teasing with models I hadn't released in three parts. Here's part 3: get you guys to finish the model instead! Kinda...

I teased a model of a torn poster a while ago:
http://tomeofpreach.files.wordpress.com/2012/12/qme-pal.png

One of the reasons I haven't released this model is that I'd like to have a good selection of skins to go with it - it's a pretty flexible model with lots of scope, and once you've released it you've missed the chance to add more. Also, my skins aren't always the best part of the models.

So I thought I'd try an experiment today, see if I get a response. I'm gonna link the model here on func_ but not put it on the blog just yet. If you want to play around with the model and try making your own poster, dive in and grab it. If you make a skin you'd like to offer for the final release, then please e-mail it to me.
http://www.quaketastic.com/upload/files/models/poster-prerelease.zip

Few quick notes: The model comes with two frames, the torn pose pictured above, and the plain poster below:
http://tomeofpreach.files.wordpress.com/2013/07/mutation.png
It is possible to create a skin which works for both poses, but don't feel obliged to, creating a dedicated clean/torn skin often works better.

The top 2/3 of the skin is taken up by the front of the poster, and the back of the poster takes up the remainder, rotated 90 degrees. The backside of the poster is there because this model is part of the window-kit pack, you can paste it on an invisible window to give it some presence, like in "tangerine dream".

The first skin on the model is a bit bright and weird, but there's a good reason. It's been painted with the colour of the player's trousers. This lets you use the trick from
http://tomeofpreach.wordpress.com/2013/07/13/palette-swapping-with-qme/
to quickly create a base texture with the colours from any palette row.

Don't feel obliged to use my template though, in fact wildly different skins are what this is all about. Mine have a tech lab/base feel but if you can create some lovely medieval wanted posters, or elder runes on human skin, more power to you! 

I love that poster model. I was going to have a torn poster secret ala Duke 3D on my base map but I decided 7 secrets was enough (plus I will probably revisit the homage at some point) 

This some time today, leave it open for a bit longer? 

We're talking weeks here, don't hurry. 

https://www.dropbox.com/s/925h5udfr0xxmvb/ijed_posters.zip

Lovecraft
Biohazard
Explosive
Tin Tin
Flat Earth
Prodigy
Quake

Each has a _torn version. It's possible that fullbrights will rear their ugly head on a couple since I haven't tried them out in engine yet - I tried to avoid this issue but it might have got past me.

I'd suggest including a 'on floor' frame and possibly a 'big' one as well. 

From the first moment I saw the wkey02 texture I wondered how it would look to have it animated. The latest models of Preach triggered the thought again so I gave it a try.

Got a bit lost texturing the thing while I wanted it to look like the original.
Here's the example

and here's the download 

Awesome man, just what I was after. I've added them to the build, and there weren't any problems shaking the last few fullbrights out. I've got a few more ideas for skins off the back of those, so I'll try not to take too long getting them together.

When you say a pose for on the floor, are you thinking one where the page doesn't curl off the floor? If it wasn't for that I'd see no problem with just rotating it to rest on the ground. Larger sizes would be fairly easy to do, and I also want to create a few more frames with variations on the torn poster. That way you could have two or three torn ones on the same wall and not make it too obvious.

While I get working on that, I've got another model coming out soon. Was about to post it but last minute fixes need doing, so hopefully tonight... 

Nice one madfox, that looks ace, didn't see it when I posted last. The more I check it out the more detail I find, like all the modeled rivets and the threading on the copper-coloured bit. 

That is very cool MadFox, I like how you got the rotation of the wheels working correctly. My only concern is the baked shadows on the wheels and the background not integrating with the wheel positions but that is a skin issue not animation. 

Glad you like them, they were quite fun to do as well.

Is there a way you could make the torn parts out of ploys instead of a modified skin? That would make it much quicker and cheaper to have more variation although it could get a bit more angular looking.

For the floor pose yeah I just meant rotated flat on the floor- I was actually thinking of dropped vox populi posters in bioshock (a poster that didn't make the cut actually, along with 'a man chooses, a slave obeys').

Madfox cogs - those are awesome. It's great linking buttons to their doors, it gives a level a physical presence and a visual clue to how it works. In base maps you can just put a cable in. But medieval maps are trickier since its always machinery. 

I printed the original tex on the wkey02 model, and in that way the shaded origin produces the odd behaviour.
I tried a slightly larger texture and kept on the vertice lines, but the skinfile needs a rather irratic treatment.
I'v spent some time on it but how more I try how more dazzeled I get.

For some reason I ain't have the patience for the texturing, while I know it can result in great outcome. 

Another weird model today. Like the buttons it's part of the "more medieval models" effort; in this case it takes a previous base-style model, the forcefield, and creates a mystical version.

http://tomeofpreach.wordpress.com/2013/07/26/runic-barrier/

The screenshot doesn't really do the model justice, as it's all about the animation. However, the animation itself is too long to make a gif for... 

cool! 

Another post from Preach, this time not a model but a tool update. It's v0.2 of the python module qmdl.

http://tomeofpreach.wordpress.com/qmdl/

There are some little tweaks to the mdl module, proper docstrings and breaking up a few methods to be more reusable. The biggest change is the addition of a "helper" object which disguises some of the complexity of working with the module. An example script which adds skins to the model would look like:

from qmdl.helper import Helper
poster = Helper()
poster.load ("poster.mdl")
poster.append_skin ("tintin.bmp")
poster.save()

It's basically something that's accreted from using the module for a while; I kept copy-pasting these functions into every file, then realised I needed to fix a bug in all of them and it was time to make a module... 

By starting an article in July and finishing it on August 1st, the article gets a publication date of 1st July!

http://tomeofpreach.wordpress.com/2013/07/01/skin-maps-for-mdl-format/

Oh, yeah, the article. This is a little history of how skin maps for .mdl files have changed over the years. So if you've ever tried to get your head around all the weird things .mdl format does with seams and backfaces, or you have a good grasp on front-back quake skins and want to understand how models with complex unwrappings work, then check it out. 

Really enjoyed this one preach, I plan on making some custom quake models so this info will be of great help!

If only I could get my brain around coding... 

Very good and informative read. 

I've asked for this before, but my previous version got broken and I lost the backup.

I can't install Qme 3.1 (.mdo support) on my 64 bit system - can someone zip their already installed version and upload it somewhere? 

Sock sent me his version, here's a link to it for anyone else who want s a copy (from my dropbox):

https://www.dropbox.com/s/l9d1t3p81q3v4yb/q1qme_3xdirectory.zip 

Yeah, the long awaited poster model is finally released properly:

http://tomeofpreach.wordpress.com/2013/08/10/poster/

Thanks to Ijed for contributing all those skins!