In my game you change levels a lot (every time you go in or out of a building). My player character model has become huge due to all the animation frames. Thus load times have become unacceptable. I realize there are few options for me: switch to bones, write my own level changing scripts instead of level_load, etc. However, before I go through the pain of one of those routes, is there a way to load an entity into memory without a level loaded and keep it there even when further level_load commands are issued? I know I can use ent_preload for texture memory, but I'm talking about the whole model.

Anyone?

Define it as a view entity like this:

entity blabla
{
type=<entity.mdl>;
//blablabla
my.visible=off;
}

That should load the entity into memory. Then just make sure ent_texshare is on and that should speed up your loading.