Transcript

Hello and welcome to lesson 2.2 GCFScape of How to Create Texture Mods presented by MLPTF2Mods.com. If we want to easily be able to open up, view, and extract items stored in VPK files, we are going to want to use GCFScape. You can find a link to the download in the video description or right below the embedded video on our site. Make sure you have the necessary runtimes installed as indicated on the download page. Otherwise it might not function properly. Additionally, when installing, it would be a great idea to check off the box to associate the program with .vpk files. Once it is installed, we can get down to business.

Start by bringing up your tf folder containing the game’s VPK files. You will notice there are quite a number of VPK files leaving the question of which one you need to open. Fortunately the answer is simple. To access a collection of VPK files, all you do is open the directory file as indicated by the _dir following its name. Since we are learning how to create texture mods, we are going to want to open up tf2_textures_dir.

When opening it up, you should be greeted with a single folder titled materials. If you ran into an error, I have two suggestions for you. First, make sure you installed the necessary runtimes mentioned on the page for GCFScape. If those are certainly installed, I would suggest rebooting your PC and installing GCFScape again. Don’t bother uninstalling it. Just reinstall overtop of the previous attempt and it should work. It is also worth noting that if you failed to associate .vpk files with GCFScape, you can try to add the file associations under the options or do it through Window’s default program manager. If you never do manage to get VPK files associated with GCFScape, which is unlikely, there is always the option to open a file from the program.

So as I said, if everything works as intended, you will see a single folder title materials. If we go exploring inside, we see there are various folders, each leading to different textures used by the game. It can be a bit of a task sometimes trying to figure out where the texture is that you want to find and replace. When starting off in modding, you might benefit by looking at mods created by other people to see what those file were named and where they were located. A common location people visit would be the models/weapons/c_items folder since people like retexturing weapons and the majority of them are found in c_items.

Once VTFEdit is installed, which is covered in the next lesson, you can open up and view any texture just by double clicking on it. Other files such as text or audio can also be opened up straight from GCFScape in their respective applications as well. To extract a copy of a file, it is as simple as dragging and dropping the desired files to another window. You can also select multiple files as you would in Windows Explorer including folders. Alternatively, if you are looking to extract a large quantity of files, you can use the built in extract function.

Before moving on I’d like to mention the useful search feature. If you know the name of the file you want but don’t want to traverse the folders, hit the search button and enter its name to get a list of matching files.

Now that we’ve got a general idea how to use GCFScape, it is time to move on to VTFEdit in the next lesson.