[WOTC] TF2 Melee Arsenal Ghost Templates
A great big cache of melee weapons stolen graciously donated to XCOM’s arsenal by Mann Co. Industries.
In this shipment, we found a variety of swords, shovels, machetes, and axes that we could give to our melee users. There’s even a garden rake thrown in there for good measure.
Infact, there’s a few oddities in here. We found this wooden plank with a giant railroad spike sticking out at the top, barely held together by two strips of duct tape. It’s not exactly… "safe", but it’ll get the job done, at least.
There’s also this battle axe with a pumpkin face carved into the blade. We assumed this was some kind of halloween prop at first, but Tygan volunteered to test it during an autopsy on a sectoid (don’t ask why). He reports the blade "became possessed" and proceeded to guide itself over the neck of the sectoid and swung downwards with "inconceivable force", cutting off its’ head with ease. He notes hearing strange, barely audible whispers during the operation. The only word he could make out was "heads", so apparently it’s also haunted.
The shipment came with a few ballistic shields, and by "ballistic shields" they mean a pair of looted museum pieces designed half a millenium ago and what appears to be the broken off steering wheel of a pirate ship. I suppose when you’re an underground resistance movement going up against a star-spanning alien empire, you’ll take what you can get. Maybe our soldiers can cosplay as medieval knights or pirates with them or something.
These weapons are a series of ghost templates that use Template Master to function.
A "ghost template" is a weapon that technically exists in-game but isn’t usable as a properly selectable weapon in the arsenal. They’re meant to be applied to other weapons as a visual re-skin using external mods, such as these:
- XSkin (personally recommended) – Allows you to re-skin any weapon you want with ease directly in the armory.
- Template Master itself – Lets you set up your own weapon templates or replace aspects of others through config.
- Weapon Skin Replacer – Ditto, but older and with less features.
If you use XSkin, the ‘Owned’ filter needs to be turned off to actually see the weapons in the re-skin menu, since the player doesn’t ‘own’ them because they’re not real, arsenal selectable weapons.
Since i see some comments about it, the categories i’ve assigned these weapons don’t matter as much as you’d think. You can give a LW2 Combat Knife a Ranger Sword skin and vice-versa, it "just works".
This especially applies to Primaries, as nearly all of them are two-handed long guns that can be given skins cross-category without much issue. This includes combinations like skinning a Sniper into a Shotgun, or a Cannon into a Vektor Rifle. If you see a weapon and wish it were in a different category, just assign it to a weapon inside that category anyway, 90% chance it’ll work without issue.
Do note if using XSkin you’ll need to turn the Category filter off to do things like this.
- Boston Basher (TF2_Boston_Basher)
- Escape Plan* (TF2_Equalizer)
- Market Gardener (TF2_Market_Gardener)
- Soldier’s Shovel (TF2_Soldier_Shovel)
(*i forgot they split the equalizer into two weapons while making this, so internally it’s referred to as the equalizer while in-game it’s named the escape plan. oops lmao)
- Axtinguisher (TF2_Axtinguisher)
- Back Scratcher (TF2_Back_Scratcher)
- Pyro’s Fire Axe (TF2_Pyro_Fire_Axe)
- Claidheamh Mòr (TF2_Zweihander)
- Eyelander (TF2_Eyelander)
- Headless Horsemann’s Headtaker (TF2_Headtaker)
- Persian Persuader (TF2_Persian_Persuader)
- Scotsman’s Skullcutter (TF2_Skullcutter)
- The Jag (TF2_The_Jag)
- Southern Hospitality (TF2_Hospitality)
- Bushwacka (TF2_Bushwacka)
- Sniper’s Kukri (TF2_Sniper_Kukri)
- Shahanshah (TF2_Shahanshah)
- Tribalman’s Shiv (TF2_Tribalmans_Shiv)
- Butterfly Knife (TF2_Spy_Knife)
- Your Eternal Reward (TF2_Eternal_Reward)
- Big Earner (TF2_Big_Earner)
- Half-Zatoichi (TF2_Half_Zatoichi)
- Pain Train (TF2_Pain_Train)
- Chargin’ Targe (TF2_Chargin_Targe)
- Splendid Screen (TF2_Splendid_Screen)
- Tide Turner (TF2_Tide_Turner)
The names in parenthesis represent that weapon’s internal template name, which’ll be relevant to you if working with config files that require use of the weapons’ template names.
All melee weapons are categorized as Swords except Spy’s knives, which are categorized as Combat Knives.
Currently, only sharp/bladed weapons are included since it’d be stupid to have something like the Frying Pan using the sword slicing SFX in-game. These sounds aren’t easy to change as they’re handled in the soldier’s animation set for a given weapon rather than the weapon’s animation set, which is where you’d usually insert SFX for a firearm, but this doesn’t work for melee weapon impact SFX, which is what’s most important here.
And even if i DID change every sound in the soldier animations to fit a particular weapon, there’s stuff like Primary Secondaries which have their own animations and thus their own SFX, rendering the effort pointless.
- Template Master – REQUIRED for this mod to work at all, obviously.
- Stormrider Class – Turn any soldier you want into XCOM’s version of a Demoknight.
- Ballistic Shields – This allows you to utilize the shields this mod comes with. Stormriders can also utilize these.
- N/A.
- Valve Software – Creators of Team Fortress 2 and most of the assets used in this mod. I say "most" because some of these weapons were community-made, and were created by their respective designers.
Required items:
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[WOTC] Iridar's Template Master - Core — Steam Workshop
