that will not skin it though afaik, what quadraxas wants is unanimated bones on each players but skinned. then the animation will be done by reading a different file which has all the animation sequences. This is good because you don't store the animations for each and every single character. This is pretty much how other major games companies are doing it aswell. it's like inheritance/derive in programming. The character models inherit/derive the animation from a different file, and the inheritance will happen by having the same name/structure on the bones. This is also good for different type of characters (tall/short/wide) since they will all work.