Okay, I can't be bothered recompiling the engine so if someone wants to do that thats fine. All I want to do is be able to use MY MODELS!! And anyway computers are better now if it takes 5 times longer to render thats 0.1 secends of my life wasted.
But you can't be bothered reducing the poly for your models?
High poly does not automatically mean good quality. The Quake 3 engine is almost 10 years old. That's like giving an 80-year-old woman breast implants.
You don't make sense. Stop wasting your life asking for things you can easily do yourself. Or better yet, put your talent to work in professional 3D artwork. No game company wants extreme high-poly models in their games. It's extremely inefficient.
Many Quake mods have greatly improved the engine adding support for things like normal mapping, hdr, bloom, opengl 2, etc.
2 things on you model:
A: quads work better for catmull clark(or whatever smoothing operation you used)
B: You will need to probably completely remake the model and make a highpoly to render a normal map (generally in modern games we can be talking serveral mill poly and this is not just a ton smoothing, but real poly detail). Then make a low poly model and apply all the maps and shaders to it.