What is the deal with the Xonotic player characters rig?

Been looking at this a few times and I can't figure out why it looks the way it do. So is there any information on the dependencies or reasons for it to be rigged the way it is?

Is it a requirement to use this same rig should I make a player character for Xonotic as it is now?

Could you explain in more detail what you mean?

The existing rigs (the newest/best is Ignis if I recall correctly) work fine if you want to re-use the existing animations.

You can of course make your own (rig and anims), but also keep in mind to allow for the QuakeC based animation blending (i.e. that the top of the body moves according to the mouse input etc.) I forgot how that was set-up exactly, but I guess it has something to do with how you name the bones.

Usually when you work with character models, you got a few/lot of dependencies to take into account for it to work right within the game.
Now, the Xonotic rigs all look pretty much the same, but they don't really make any sense from a rigging/animating perspective. Which makes me wonder why they do have the heirarchy and design as they do.

Disclaimer: Im not 100% about this, so take it as a educated guess rather than facts.

TLDR: The names of the bones and animations (and possibly lengths of the animations) are the set part, the rest could/can be rearranged.

Bone names are used as attachment points from gamecode, and for animation blending thus they need to stay the same. Animation names (or rather the order) is also "set". adding new after the standard set ones should be fine though. length of animations are relevant when they are (somewhat) synched to in game actions, such as melee slap. Since Xonotic does NOT use ingame IK or anything like that, the structure of the rig in other terms (how you limit joints, link them etc) is at the animators discretion.

Ok, thanks for your reply.