yes, i know that.

but the mesh you work with and the data that gets drawn by direct3d shouldn't and doesn't have to be the same.

i think internally the engine would need a second data structure with a welded closed mesh for calculating stencil shadows (but the a6 stencil shadows are useless anyway ) even if some vertices of the mesh that gets drawn are split to achieve hard edges.

there has to be some solution for this in 3dgs! most other engines have solutions for this.

and the mdl7 format isn't a direct representation of the direct3d mesh. it's an artist format which doesn't only get loaded and displayed by the engine but is also meant to be worked with in med so i don't see a problem with adding some kind of smoothing information to it.