Hmm this sounds more like animation development than ingame use ... if this is the case then DB has support this for almost a year and a half now - and DBpro has it built in.
Mesh deformation is the result of exporting a model, rather than the skeleton you use to create the animation in the first place it calculates how the skeleton affects the mesh(skin) and outputs the mesh's vertex new position as the keyframe of animation.
Personally I dislike the mesh deformation as it allows no end control over the animation - so if you want to simulate someone getting blown up you'd have to animate it before hand, where as skeletal animation calculates the keyframes whilst in engine - which is useful for more than just simple mesh deformed animation like in Half Life, but also good for adaptive animation like in Oni.
Making skeletons to animation and attaching them varies greatly between programs, in Milkshape you select Vertex by hand - Max you envelope and weight - trueSpace automatically does it all!
Really if you want to know more about howto animate in a particular program you'll have to let me know which one ... but if you want to know howto animate using skeletons within DB/Pro - sorry, but you'll have to figure that out yourself as my current version is exclusive to someones project.
Holy jumping mother of god NOOOO!!!...
