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, Dalokohs Bar, and Vita-Saw, began as skins and were later contributed into the game.

Skins can be created, downloaded and installed by players; they usually aim to change the material, model or sounds of a particular aspect of the game such as a weapon or character. Most skins are client-sided, meaning they show up only for the person who has them installed. However, server owners can apply server-side skins that are viewable by everyone who enters the server.

Skins are used almost entirely for cosmetic and aesthetic purposes; they can range from simple retextures to full on recreations of certain game aspects. However, skins do not change any stats or effects of any items or aspects in game.

There are multiple popular websites on which skins for Team Fortress 2 can be downloaded.

Players can create their own skins using material modifying programs such as Photoshop, 3D modeling and animating programs such as Blender or 3DMax and sound editing programs such as Audacity. Multiple tutorials on different aspects of skinning are available online.

Testing Skins

Previously, creators of new models had to use cheats to test and view their community skins and models. With the addition of the Contribution Page, people have been able to submit their creations to be judged and added to TF2's weapon database. With the addition of the map Item_test, mod makers are now able to test their models more effectively so they may be contributed.

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
  • Colored bodies with different colored heads
• 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. For more information, please see the Pure Servers article on the VDC.

Installing skins

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

External links

• GameBanana
• TF2Mods