[Feature Request] Embedding new skins into weapons/player models.

[BigHatMarley]

Hello, developers!

I've been working on some experimental potential features to enhance mapping and such, and I came to the idea of setting up Weapons and Player Models to utilise the in-built Skin function in Source.

So far with my experimentation, Weapons are near perfect in using them, able to be set through map inputs or on items by default through keyvalues. This also means they can be modified by maphacks, if desirable.

The featured example is forward porting the classic 1.05 Barricade Hammer to the current game version as Skin 1, whereas the current Barricade Hammer remains as the default Skin 0. I append the file name with _01, _02 etc to maintain compatibility and readability with the way things are setup as of now.

While the VMTs needed modification to fit into the current style of acting as patch files, it was pretty quick and easy to do. If there was other classic skins that could be brought back like this, it would be interesting! Otherwise, creating our own new ones (or, if handled well, asking workshop creators if they would like their reskins added can work) would be the best route, and can be slowly improved and grown overtime.

Everything is still under experimenting, but Player Models suffer inconsistency between the player model, zombie model and ragdoll. (Assumedly, this could be adjusted and fixed up, but for now I'll focus on Weapons since they seem the least required effort to implement this to.)

The only issue of note so far for Weapon Skins, is of course no Keyvalue by default in Hammer (Though can be added by turning off SmartEdit), and that the Inventory Icon won't automatically match. I would argue the Icon is not critical, but would be nice to get to work in reflecting the skin. Worst case, you include the icon, and manually reference it in the item.

If anything, demonstrating this system works can encourage workshop and custom model swaps to expand their own texture selection in one mod, rather than multiple. It also appears that This Tool can be used to modify pre-existing models without recompiling, no clue if that'll be handy since I did it the hard way.

I'll continue building and trying things out, and if this sounds of any interest to add, just shout at me. If it's not, still shout so I can stop!!!

Screenshot showcase of various states of the weapon (held, bloody, worldmodel and consistency) (Planning on a potential workshop demonstration soon) :