Somewhat excitedly confused about animated X to XSI model that's animated?

[OvermindDL1]

BZ1 does not use XSI's, it uses something called .geo as I recall, proprietary for BZ1 only as I recall.

I would bet that, although BZ2 stores scale animation data in the mesh, it does not use it because of the variety of ways to implement it, first of all, scale around *what* point, the model origin, the frame origin, etc... and so forth, plus you can do 'scale' animation by just animation each vertex manually to do the same thing, transformation and rotation is all you truly need.  Another reason is that when something is scaled then its normals have to be recalculated to get proper lighting, and this is an old engine, and that operation does have enough overhead to not want to be called every few frames back then I would guess (although animation the points manually anyway would technically need it, they don't).
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[mrtwosheds]

maybe make a geom effect that shrinks and gets bigger

Particle effects tend no to show up when they are inside buildings.