its a poly drawn if an ent has a state "count" above zero and has the effects of bobbing/rotating for ammo. the only thing that i added to the engine was a long integer in the entity state to move the amount over to clients. it's not an ent client side either, just a poly like a smoke trail, but not a refdef ent like in q3 either. (i'm guessing the sprites in wfa are like the score numbers that float up). The only reason i did it this way is because i can push over a string in an ent if i wanted to, to have real names above the head instead of an ogc-like additional refdef (like acrid made for tc)
there is no friend/foe poly deal so i had to create something like that. only thing is that its creating trails; still twigging the renderer to draw 1 frame polies.