How do I modify the muzzle flash and projectile for a gun?

[ParasiteDelta]

I've been learning how to modify Source games, but I cannot find a guide that shows me how to modify the muzzle flash or projectile of a weapon. Do I have to break apart the coding and modify it from there? Is there some type of texture that I have to alter? What I'm aiming for is changing the flash and projectiles to fit more of a laser weapon. I have the software, but I need the knowledge. Anyone care to help me out?

[Mute]

I don't know about the projectiles (could be in the same file, didn't check) but for the muzzle flashes, you need to open pak01_dir.vpk in GCFScape, extract 'weapon_fx.pcf' from the particles folder, open up the Authoring Tools and select L4D2 Tools Mode. Once that opens, select the Tools menu at the top and select Particle Editor. Once done, open the .pcf file which you recently extracted and navigate to the weapon_muzzle_flah particle effects. Alternatively, you could just modify the textures, but some of the textures could be shared with other guns.

[ParasiteDelta]

Do you know if this is a system standard file or does each gun have different corresponding files? What I was aiming for was modifying some of the guns that I got from workshop, but I could also just make it a game-wide mod. Thank you for your help so far, you're more help than Google in this matter :p

[Mute]

weapon_fx has numerous muzzle flashes for different weapons, but I don't think it's unique for every single gun, I think (haven't checked, could be wrong) it's split up into weapon classes, like pistol, rifle, shotgun, etc.

[ParasiteDelta]

Yeah, I found that out myself. And what did you mean by "alternatively, you could just modify the textures, but some of the textures could be shared with other guns"? I'm a bit daunted at how much I would have to learn and modify just for a muzzle flash, but is there some alternative file that I could edit? Or do you mean extracting the file for each muzzle flash and then altering it from there?

[Mute]

Using GCFScape again, and opening the same pak01_dir.vpk, if you navigate to the 'materials/effects' directory, you can find a number of .vtf and .vmt files. You need the program VTFEdit to view and modify them. Extract the .vtf files that start with muzzleflash and you can see the original textures. To modify them, simply import your new texture in, with the same name and make an addon out of it.