User modifications

Skins are user-created modifications that change the appearances of weapons, Hats, player models, or any part of the game. Skins are unofficial and are not supported by Valve. Some weapons, such as the Homewrecker and the Dalokohs Bar, began as skins and were later contributed into the game.

Used as cheats

While most skins are used to improve or slightly alter the visual aspects of the game, some use them to try to get an unfair advantage. These include, but are not limited to:

• Materials
  • Seeing players/items through walls
  • Glow-in-the-dark
• Models
  • Show only hitboxes of players
  • Skewed to show locations
    • "Giant head" to see player locations behind obstacles
    • "Bubble" around pickups
• Particles
  • Attached to models to make them more visible
    • Show the location of cloaked Spies
• Sounds
  • Increase volume to alert from further
    • Sentry Gun beeps
    • Spies decloaking

Due to their nature, these kinds of cheats are not detected by VAC, which only deals with external programs or altered game code. However, there is some protection from these for servers by setting the 'sv_pure' console variable [default 0] to 1 and creating a whitelist, or to 2 which causes all content to be default.[1]

Installing skins

Skins probably come with instructions how to install them. They typically are installed somewhere under the directory steam/steamapps/<accountname>/Team Fortress 2/tf.

External Links

http://fpsbanana.com

http://tf2mods.net