openQ4 automatically builds compact binary caches for MD5 animations as they are first encountered. Later launches can load the final animation data directly instead of decompressing and parsing the much larger text source again.
The first visit to animation-heavy maps can therefore take slightly longer while cache files are written. Subsequent visits should be faster. A representative Air Defense 1 run generated 820 cache entries using about 27 MiB and reduced the animation-heavy model-definition phase from roughly 2.7–2.8 seconds to about 1.0 second on the tested Windows x64 system.
Caches are written below the active save path:
<fs_savepath>/baseoq4/generated/animations/
They are generated runtime data, not replacement game assets, and should not be copied into retail Quake 4 PK4s.
Each cache records the source path, source size, timestamp, and containing PK4 checksum where applicable. A stale, truncated, corrupt, or mismatched cache is ignored and rebuilt from the installed source animation.
The cache stores fixed-width values and floating-point arrays in a portable byte order. x64 and ARM64 builds use the same format, although moving the game installation or changing the source package can intentionally trigger a rebuild.
Loaded cache data becomes the normal runtime animation data; openQ4 does not retain a second permanent copy in memory. Animation memory reporting also includes base-frame storage.
Both controls default to enabled:
g_useGeneratedAnimCache 1
g_writeGeneratedAnimCache 1
- Set
g_useGeneratedAnimCache 0to bypass existing generated animation caches. - Set
g_writeGeneratedAnimCache 0to prevent new cache files from being written. - Disable both for a source-parse benchmark.
To force a clean rebuild, close openQ4 and delete the generated/animations/ directory under the active fs_savepath. Do not delete the original models/**/*.md5anim files from the Quake 4 installation.