Has there been any thought about hand models? I (very briefly) worked with the kreedz climbing (kzmod) guys to implement a system with unique hand models for every character model. Is this something that should be in DAB? Here's how their system worked (insofar as I can remember) :
The weapons and hands were separate models, so they were loaded into the viewmodel space separately. The weapons had their own animations, while all the hand models drew from a shared animations file (which is easy to include in the .qc at compile). This meant that in order to create new hand models, all you would have to do was rig them up to the existing hand rig. Unfortunately it also meant that in order to add a new weapon, new animations would have to be made for the weapon, and the hand rig, which meant recompiling all hand models. It also made it a little bit more complicated for the modeller to create weapons, since the hands and weapon would have to be animated together but exported separately. Not a great deal, but a little bit confusing at first.
I think a problem with this was making sure the hands and weapons lined up seamlessly when animating in game, since they were calling animations synchronously. I am pretty sure the viewmodel animations are handled client side so network lag etc doesn't have a terrible effect on things. It also required that the people making (or at least compiling) the models had to be pretty cluey with their qc.
Another way to do it is to make a separate model for every character, every weapon and hand combination all sharing the same animation file. This makes it more work, but a simpler workflow. In order to add a weapon all you have to do is make the animations and put them into the shared weapons animation, but you have to compile you weapon model with every single hand model in the game, which could get frustrating if more characters are added, but could probably be largely automated.
It's not a necessary feature, more like icing on the cake, but I was wondering if you guys had thought about it at all, and which system would be better.