How to Disable/Remove a Server's Custom Weapon Models and Audio Overrides.

A guide for GoldSrc games on how to disable or remove a server's custom audio and models from over-riding the game's defaults, or just prevent them playing. This guide is mainly for those who find a server's weapon models and custom audio (such as Unreal Tournament style announcers) to be too annoying or distracting. This guide applies to any GoldSrc game, it's under CS 1.6 guide as it suffers the most from this issue.

Quick Intro

Are you sick of joining servers and having ugly or very out of place weapon models replacing the game's default? Were you just wanting to enjoy killing other players or bots but are getting really annoyed over the loud UT announcer going "DOUBLE KILL!" "HEADSHOT!" "OWNAGE!" every couple of seconds? Well, this is the guide for you.

Do note though that this is mainly for servers that aren't hosting custom game-modes. The more a server differs from the vanilla game, the more likely those custom models and audios might be needed.

How to Delete Custom Server Downloads

Read the rest of the guide before doing this

You wanna understand how we'll be dealing with custom downloads before deleting everything, just so you don't have to redo a step or waste time re-downloading certain files from a server you like.

To delete custom server downloads that you have already downloaded, navigate to your game's/half-life folder. If you don't know where it's located, right click on the game in your Steam Library, hover over Manage, then click Browse local files.


Do note though that you will be taken to the Half-Life folder and not directly to the folder of what game you selected. In the File Explorer, there should be at least two additional folders that features the game's shorten name, as well as another file named the same but with _download at the end. We'll be opening the download folder. For CS 1.6, the folder is named cstrike_downloads. For Standard Half-Life, it's under valve_downloads.


Inside the _download folder is everything you downloaded from the servers you joined. Simply delete everything inside if you wish to remove all your server downloads. You don't have to delete everything though. If you want to keep the maps you downloaded (plus their spectator overviews), keep the maps, overviews and the .wad files. You can also handpick specifically whatever you want removed.

Note though that simply deleting server downloads doesn't mean they won't re-download if you didn't make any changes to how you download custom server content. That's what the next sections are for.

Disabling All Downloads (The Easy Way for Mostly Vanilla Servers)

If the server you're playing on is sticking with default maps and not adding a bunch of additions to the game, then this is a simple and easy method to use. Simply open the in-game Console by pressing ` on your keyboard (to the left of the 1 key on QWERTY keyboards), and type:

cl_allowdownload 0

You may want to also do cl_download_ingame 0 , which disables sprays and whatever could possibly be downloaded while in game.

This should prevent you from downloading any of the custom files the server would have sent you. This includes custom audio and weapon models.

Pros

• Very easy to do
  
• Saves disk space and time it takes to join a server by skipping the download process
  
• Easy to disable/revert if problems arise

Cons

• Your client might get buggy if the server uses a model meant to add something rather than replace an existing default model
  
• Not recommended for some custom game modes (zombies and other modes that heavily change the game, Death Match and Gun Game might be fine though.)
  
• You can't download custom-maps from the server

Unfortunately, disabling all downloads means not downloading anything, which includes custom maps. If the server is hosting a custom map you don't have, you will be kicked from the server with the following message:


You can swap cl_allowdownload to 1 to download the map, but that also means you are downloading everything else from the server. Unlike source games, you either download everything, or you download nothing.

Replacing the Server Downloads with Defaults or Blank Files

Instead of preventing all server downloads, we're gonna allow our game to everything, but then modify whatever we don't like back to defaults. We can replace their view models with the game's defaults and mute whatever sound files we don't like.

Muting Sound Files

In this example, I joined a CS:CZ server that added an female announcer that states when nearly anything happens, basically a UT announcer. Let's mute her.
She's located czero_downloads\sound\misc\sexy. For me, the majority of global announcement audio was located in the misc folder, though her audio was the only one to have a special folder inside, everything else for me was unsorted in the misc folder.


You can either do two things from here: You can either download[files.catbox.moe] a blank wav file I already made (assuming Steam dosn't remove it.) Or you can make one your self with any program that can edit audio. For a free audio editor, I suggest getting Audacity (or any forks of the program).

If you downloaded the blank wave file, follow the instructions in the image:
Note: The website I uploaded the file to might have renamed to blank wav file's name to a random string of characters, but the instructions remain the same

For Audacity:
Again, any audio editing program should work just fine

Reverting Custom Weapon models to defaults

Custom weapon models are stored in xxx_downloads\models, and to replace them with the defaults, we're just gonna take the defaults that exist in gamename\models and replace the custom models. The Custom models aren't usually named the same as the default models, so we simply can't drag and drop to replace the models. Instead, you paste the default model into the custom folder, copy the name of the custom model's name, delete it, then rename the default model's name to the custom model's name. For weapon models, there's likely more than one file you'll need to replace, each one with a different starting letter followed by an underscore. For most CS 1.6 weapons, it either takes two or three models that need to be replaced.

Here is an image example:

Pros

• Be able to still have a server's custom content, game-modes and maps while removing the content you dislike.
  
• Should be full proof and you shouldn't encounter any issues if done right

Cons

• Can be tedious and take quite a while to do
  
• You have* to download the server's content first before being able to edit the stuff you don't like out
  
• Trail and error if the server's model names aren't very clear

[zuawdaed]

we seriously need one additional option for downloads like in every other valve game after 2004.