There is an ongoing information war raging in the software world. Despite free software developers’ best efforts, new proprietary software continues to proliferate. Improved techniques must be developed to reverse engineer efficiently closed data formats so that free, interoperable solutions can be deployed under Linux.

Software reverse engineering occurs on various levels. It may be necessary to study a piece of poorly written, poorly commented code developed in a high-level language such as C++ and understand what the original program was supposed to accomplish. It may also be necessary to disassemble a program that has been compiled into machine language and express it as a higher-level language. In doing this, the underlying algorithms can eventually be expressed as higher-level concepts in a human language. After obtaining an algorithmic description via reverse engineering, the algorithm can be reimplemented for any language on any computing platform.
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This document is intended to be a guide or a reference for those who, using Maya to create their characters, want to export them into the Quake III Arena engine. It’s based on our experience at the Virtual World of Art (VWA) where we wanted to create our own avatars for our environments, and reflects as well some particularities due to the specific needs of our project, that might not be the same of the average user willing to create boths for the game. We just use Quake III Arena as an engine for a very different context than what the game itself is about, but I think that it can be a useful reference nevertheless for those Quake III Arena enthusiasts that, using already Maya to model, texture and animate their characters, would like to see them fighting in Quake III Arena.
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