Replacing gun fire particles to increase FPS in Zombie Escape

Hi. I kept this to myself for awhile and haven’t made any changes since then so I thought it might be helpful to someone out there as it has helped me. The idea is to gain a bit of fps and reducing some of the effects that’s going on in GO. It’s ideal for anyone with a sluggish computer or just want some “classic” looking effects. CS:GO is without a doubt particle heavy and those particles are absolutely excessive and heavy. They’re cool and they’re good. But not for everyone in full servers with 64 players and heavy gun fire going on. Hopefully someone finds a use for this.

Preview: Streamable[/URL] (Video) or [URL=‘https://gfycat.com/PlumpUntriedDouglasfirbarkbeetle’]Gfycat

Download: MEGA

To install:
1.) Get to the directory of your main CS:GO folder.
2.) Open pak01_dir.vpk with a hex editor[/URL] or [URL=‘https://notepad-plus-plus.org/’]Notepad++. Whatever you prefer.
3.) Replace particles_manifest with particles_manXfest. Why? The game will try to look for a particles_manifest and it won’t be from the vpk. We “corrupted” our vpk in a sense where we can then load our own custom content as a player for a replacement. This is how it works and it is indeed annoying/complicated from what it used to be.
4.) Navigate to your /particles/ folder.
5.) Copy and paste this as particles_manifest.txt in the exact directory under the main CS:GO folder.
6.) Drop the cs_weapons_fx_less.pcf downloaded above into this folder as well.
7.) Done.

This will remove all tracers. Add a fun blood pool for each time a player is shot (reasonably less excessive than it sounds but you can download here for no blood pool, rename and remove the _nb at the end for ease and follow directions above). Less blood effects. Less ‘dink’ sparks. Reduce the molotov fire in first person. A different setup for the radio command exclamation mark (mostly the same).

If you can’t follow along or something went wrong you messed something up along the line and managed to create a headache for yourself. Congratulations! Figure out where you messed up on. If all else fails verify cache for CS:GO and it will revert everything for you. This will kick you out of sv_pure 1 servers. If you know the server owner and get kicked by this ask them kindly to support ‘modding’ by setting sv_pure 0 in their server. Please don’t ask me Valve Anti-Cheat related questions. It’s answered regarding sv_pure. You will be kicked from official Valve servers or any server with sv_pure 1 enabled. Nothing more. You will have to repeat this process for every ‘major’ CS:GO update that is pushed.

To easily revert just verify cache for CS:GO and you’re done. No hassle in untangling anything.

3 Likes

I’m gonna try this but I have a question. I edited pak01_dir to install custom skins from gamebanana but after every update I have to do the same process again. Is this the case?

Yes. Every update that does changes to the VPK on Valve’s end you will have to start the process all over. No matter how small a change it may be if they touch it you’re facing a few minutes of time to get the effects going again.

1 Like

Thanks for the tutorial Syo. I prefer these weapon particles and the performance is better. That blood is too much for me so I get no blood pool version.

This looks awesome, gonna try to out. Sometimes i feel like tracers are blocking my sight