Fortifying the Fortress (an extensive TF2 improvement list)
Quite often in gaming an update will roll round and introduce new things to the players. Team Fortress 2 can pretty much hold a record for how many updates it has released, from the major game patches that introduced new weapons and achievements to the small ones that made the smallest of bugfixes, they’ve always had something for everyone. Gamers rejoice!
However, after all these updates there are still some things wrong with the game. Maybe you’ve noticed them and maybe they’ve slowly been bothering you. So, with the Engineer Update just around the corner I thought I’d share with you my favourite tweaks and mods available from FPSBanana, all of which do their best to patch up these errors. Feel free to leave a comment of your own recommended performance tweaks and I’ll add them right here, but bear in mind that this list is looking for a specific type of mod. It must contribute to or even improve the visual splendour and art style of the game. I’m not looking for ‘realistic’ mods, or mods that change the models outright. (there are a few exceptions)
DISCLAIMER: It is recommended you back up your game files before attempting to install these mods. As is the nature of custom content they are provided “as is” and aren’t guaranteed to work with your installation. Always consult the instructions and readme files provided with the mods so you don’t screw stuff up. A lot of these skins require a powerful rig but I’m guessing you’re already aware of this since you’ve already read this much of the guide. Also as with any other user created content some of these mods will only work on a whitelisted server, or one with sv_pure set to 0.
Something you’ll see quite a lot in this guide are mods designed to patch stuff that haven’t been updated since TF2’s beta-stages of development. Note the default icon for the Spy class for example, its shows the beta Spy – the new Spy has a pinstripe suit. Other classes still show the beta shading, so this mod updates the class icons with the current textures and shading.
Link: http://www.fpsbanana.com/guis/20517
Credits: fOku5
What other HUD mod gives you advice on improving your tactics in game? This mod makes a very useful contribution to the ever-changing rules of TF2 combat. It’s also good if you’re bored of reading the same basic advice in-between loading. It includes tips on how to use unlockable weapons and even a few joke tips.
Link: http://www.fpsbanana.com/guis/20854
Credits: Shugo Takahashi
The bucket icons were never updated to match the shading and texturing when the style was updated. This mod uses the official Valve Backpack icons for the base weapons, resized and reformatted to replace the originals. Note to Valve – if you’re going to flat-out ignore updating a default part of the game – what’s the point of having it in the first place? Nobody I know uses the bucket anyway.
Link: http://www.fpsbanana.com/guis/20643
Credits: Shugo Takahashi
The first set of hats that came out had huge, ugly icons. So Shugo here changed them to match the later ones, just like he did with the bucket icons. For the sake of uniformity he edited some of the newer ones but if you would rather keep those ones, just don’t install them.
Link: http://www.fpsbanana.com/guis/22296
Credits: Shugo Takahashi
The next time you’re in single player build up an ubercharge and uber an Engineer. Now look at his face – the invuln goggles texture will go across his nose. That’s right; the ubercharge skins were never updated from Beta. This skin pack uses textures based on the modern player models. This will affect all nine classes on both teams as they all have problems with their textures.
Link: http://www.fpsbanana.com/skins/74875
Credits: Shugo Takahashi
Whether you’re stealing plans to build a mega-death laser or the blueprints for the perfect clown car, make the intelligence briefcase worth dying for and slap a new texture on this bad boy! (note: will not fix that seal to stop important documents flying out)
Link: http://www.fpsbanana.com/skins/66376
Credits: {H.H} Boba Fett
The flamethrower, the bane of spies and loved by newbies everywhere (don’t flame me). Want to make it even cooler (I mean hotter) by adding a yummy high-res texture? This is the mod for you! Download it and Spies everywhere will faint at the very sight of it (or faint after bumping into you, results may vary).
Link: http://www.fpsbanana.com/skins/30659
Credits: DDbrother821
From here-on, you’ll start to notice these are reskins of unlockable weapons in the game. The only possible explanation for this is that Valve likes to cut corners when skinning the new weapons so they’re released on time. Such as the case with the Kritzkrieg, the texture is bland and ugly. This new texture has been painstakingly blown up to a massive 2048×2048px resolution, making the original texture look inferior
Link: http://www.fpsbanana.com/skins/48749
Credits: 90SK
Made by the same guy that made the previous skin, the higher-res backburner updates the design with yet another 2048×2048px texture. There is also a medium res texture at 1024×1024px if your computer can’t handle that much awesome. While it does lack in team-based colouring (much like the original), there is the option to keep or remove the snake eye and use a stripe design.
Link: http://www.fpsbanana.com/skins/48867
Credits: 90SK
The Ambassador was a notoriously lazy skinning job. The engraving looked illegible, the colour scheme was awkward and they even forgot to put a hole in the barrel for bullets to go through. This skin solves this problem by applying an equal amount of detail throughout the whole model, changed the colouring and materials on the gun to make it look like real metal and added shading. (Oh yeah, don’t forget the bullet hole)
Link: http://www.fpsbanana.com/skins/66290
Credits: Argle Bargle
Why would you make a weapon unlock that is just a pair of boxing gloves? Weren’t boxing gloves invented to prevent injury to fist fighting? What bloody sense does that make? By wrapping them in barbed wire it at least makes a bit more sense. But still, why not have the fists dipped into hot glue and broken glass like in Kickboxer? That would be dope.
EDIT: Okay, the Boxing Gloves were invented to prevent injury to knuckles causing more deaths, stop leaving comments about it.
Link: http://www.fpsbanana.com/skins/67826
Credits: Evil_Ice
A higher res Energy drink… ‘nuff said…
Link: http://www.fpsbanana.com/skins/60732
Credits: BrainZ
You know, for a video game company that released a groundbreaking game about a physicist that went around shooting aliens, soldiers and zombies, you would think they’d know a little bit about physics. Alas, the jarate, no matter how much you move will only jiggle a bit after you equip it. Installing this add-on makes the jar of wee jiggle around in the jar when you move (if it’s really that important to you).
Link: http://www.fpsbanana.com/skins/77423
Credits: Sparkwire
Pop quiz: You introduce a class that has a gun that can fire a maximum of six grenades, the developers decide it’s too powerful and decide to reduce the number of grenades that can be fired by two. What is the maximum number of grenades that class will be able to fire now? If you guessed four, you should shoot yourself for guessing.
Link: http://www.fpsbanana.com/skins/61893
Credits: Ampersand
This pack makes an improvement on the original gibs by increasing the texture file size to 1024×512px, combining the gib skins with the official player skins. Oh yeah, the originals weren’t updated from the beta stages.
Link: http://www.fpsbanana.com/skins/49262
Credits: The Kins
That concludes this guide for TF2 improvements. With that, I end this article with an open statement to Valve: Maybe you guys think I’m being a pedantic tosser and like nitpicking. That’s not the case, for the most part TF2 has raised the bar in the video gaming industry with its stellar art direction, offbeat humor and unique gameplay- and raises that bar even further whenever an update is released. But that is certainly no excuse to flat out neglect certain parts of your game because if left to their own devices for long enough they’ll keep coming back to irritate players just like me.
Hell, if you’re feeling generous how about you make these mods official and give the authors community weapons? (hint hint)
Stumble it!
himmelstoss responded on 14 Mar 2010 at 6:27 pm #
That KGB looks brutal.
Shugo responded on 14 Mar 2010 at 6:29 pm #
Woah, a few of those are mine! Awesome!
Shugo responded on 14 Mar 2010 at 6:35 pm #
By the way, another ‘fix’ I made is to the backpack hat icons:
http://www.fpsbanana.com/guis/22296
The first set of hats that came out have huge and ugly icons and they always bothered me, so I changed them to match the later ones. I also edited a few of the new ones for uniformity, but if you don’t like those you can always just not install them.
asd responded on 14 Mar 2010 at 7:23 pm #
The bucket icons actually are cool as they are, me thinks :S
Niveks responded on 14 Mar 2010 at 8:36 pm #
They should remove those ugly sharped pipes, attached somewhere on the pyro’s hand and goind to the flamethrower http://uppix.net/6/0/7/89c76eb4b39777e3cbc31155b75e3.jpg
Muffin Man responded on 14 Mar 2010 at 8:36 pm #
I wish I could actually download these or view the screenshots, but FPSBanana is such a piece of crap. None of the screenshots or the download page on the site will load for me. :/
Soylent Robot responded on 14 Mar 2010 at 10:02 pm #
This would be a top article if FPSBanana wasnt such a piece of ass. Still, I guess its not your fault. I migh try and get these.
@Niveks God that annoys me so much!
n00bie51 responded on 14 Mar 2010 at 10:50 pm #
I’ll be sure to check these out once I come home.
dopelfish responded on 14 Mar 2010 at 11:20 pm #
I can see where it would lead to: “ZOGMF THE NEW UPDATE GAVE ME LESS 10 FPSES VALVE U SUK”, but overall this is what they should do, or at least make an option. Too bad that the mods tend to screw up after visiting sv_pure 2 servers.
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UnrealCanine responded on 15 Mar 2010 at 12:13 am #
Boxing gloves prevent injury to the attacker not the victim. in fact, boxing with gloves is more dangerous then bare fist
Druss responded on 15 Mar 2010 at 1:19 am #
@Shugo – I’m glad you find your work appreciated! As for your other fix (the hat icons), I’ll add that up as soon as I can.
@Muffin Man – I understand fpsbanana isn’t the best optimized website in the world, that’s why I’ve made those spiffy heading pictures to show off the mods in high res.
Zorgulon responded on 15 Mar 2010 at 2:28 am #
UnrealCanine is entirely correct: you actually get more deaths in boxing with gloves. If you’re beating someone with your bare hands, you hurt/damage your knuckles, and so are more likely to stop before they die.
Apart from that, your suggestions are good, but towards the end they fall too often on higher-res textures than actual fixes, which obviously have an impact on the framerate of the game for many players, with little actual reward.
Druss responded on 15 Mar 2010 at 2:45 am #
UnrealCanine – You’ve been watching QI, haven’t you?
r3loaded responded on 15 Mar 2010 at 4:15 am #
These looks nice – but the FPS Banana website seems to be down…
Captain MuminTrollet responded on 15 Mar 2010 at 6:00 am #
These are quite impressive
Druss responded on 15 Mar 2010 at 6:56 am #
r3loaded – perhaps a result of the increased hits that site is experiencing now that I published this article… idk
Druss responded on 15 Mar 2010 at 7:00 am #
@Zorgulon – Some of the textures are available in different sizes, and it is entirely possible to modify these textures yourself so you get a size that works best for your PC (provided you ask the author permission first, I suppose). Besides, the level of detail in these textures are simply staggering compared to the originals.
Matt responded on 15 Mar 2010 at 11:02 am #
Good article, but I’d like to echo others and point out that
a) FPSBanana is down
and b) I’ve gotten 3 trojans from them during momentary collapses of antivirus, and it’s best to assume the internet is stupid and surfing without AV, so a potential badness-warning is never a bad idea.
gelugon2105 responded on 15 Mar 2010 at 3:00 pm #
The higher res gibs will cause the game to be put up for ratings reviewings in Down Under and some backwards European countries.
Druss responded on 15 Mar 2010 at 9:50 pm #
@Matt – The way I see it, there’s two ways to work around FPSBanana, and neither of them look plausable. The first is to convince Valve to make these mods official, which some would think is possible given the fact that they pay a lot more attention to their community than other game developing companies do, but I for one doubt that. The other option would be to host these somewhere else, and since there’s a LOT of mods that will require a LOT of bandwidth, you would want to put these up on a torrent. But the already bad reputation of torrents may make the authors angry.
So yeah, unless you’re planning on hosting these yourself and you can convince the authors to allow you to host their work you’re pretty much stuck with FPSBanana.com, so my advice would be to load your antivirus, run a spyware scan and all that other junk.
@gelugon2105 – Like the original gib skins were any worse… what?
n00bie51 responded on 16 Mar 2010 at 1:57 am #
Here is my solution to Valve’s outdated beta bucket icons:
Enable fast switch.
Druss responded on 16 Mar 2010 at 4:03 am #
@n00bie51 – “…if you’re going to flat-out ignore updating a default part of the game – what’s the point of having it in the first place? Nobody I know uses the bucket anyway.”
Napalm@8U responded on 16 Mar 2010 at 8:52 am #
Glad I could help you guys with the pics. See you guys on your server.
Druss responded on 16 Mar 2010 at 9:16 am #
^_^
Drexer responded on 16 Mar 2010 at 10:57 am #
@gelugon2105
Sure, because people with average or under-excellent computers don’t exist in the USA, right?
Coming Second responded on 16 Mar 2010 at 9:02 pm #
Good article, but quick bit of trivia for you – boxing with gloves on actually causes more injury than bare knuckle fighting. Why? Because with boxing gloves you can keep ON punching your opponent as hard as you like more or less indefinitely, whilst you can usually only hit a guy with your bare fists a few times before you have to stop or risk seriously injuring your own hands.
Arthur responded on 17 Mar 2010 at 6:07 am #
Don’t down load it
SERIOSLY!
I installed all of it, my game started lagging to fuck, went into materials found a file called “imgay” in it where 3 scripts designed to kill fps. I don’t know which one it came from though.
Mr Stabby responded on 17 Mar 2010 at 8:35 am #
@Arthur – There is nothing of the sort in my materials folder and I checked the contents of all these downloads. Stop trolling, you enormous queer.
Ydna responded on 19 Mar 2010 at 8:33 am #
Valve is actually releasing an update tomorrow to fix these issues. Man, they REALLY care for ubercharged.net .
n00bie51 responded on 19 Mar 2010 at 9:41 am #
Holy crap, Ydna is right! Go to TeamFortress.com now!
Druss responded on 19 Mar 2010 at 7:32 pm #
I might update this article to compensate for the new update.
I cannot determine whether any Valve employees have read this or not, there doesn’t seem to be anything in my inbox from them.
High Res Team Fortress 2 Skins. - Overclock.net - Overclocking.net responded on 19 Aug 2010 at 12:39 pm #
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