For over a year now, I have been frustrated that there was no custom HUD/some way to change the item descriptions in the inventory to match the state the weapons are in on Castaway, as it's the server I play on 99% of the time and its balance is the most relevant to me. I have long wanted to check what items do by merely looking at them in my inventory instead of having to check the website or print !reverts to the console.
Turns out you can just edit TF_English.txt and change the descriptions that way. However, it isn't simply a matter of locating a weapon's description and editing it. The way TF2 works, it displays each attribute based on what TF_English.txt tells the game that attribute should say. For certain attributes, like the Sandman's "Alt-Fire: Launches a ball that slows opponents," which exist only on one weapon, it is as easy as editing the text to say whatever you want. In this case, changing the word "slows" to "stuns."
Other weapons are the exact same between Castaway and Vanilla, except that they have had an attribute removed, or a unique negative attribute added. For example, the vanilla Flying Guillotine lacks the "100% critical hit vs stunned players" stat. Luckily, the attribute just above where that should go is only on the Flying Guillotine, so that attribute's text can be appended to accommodate this. This is functionally identical. For unique attributes that need to be removed, you can simply delete the text from TF_English.txt.
(Note the fact that the old attribute text is right under, and was never actually removed.)
Unfortunately, many weapons have been nerfed over the years by adding some kind of damage penalty or swing speed penalty, etc. Attributes like these are actually only in TF_English.txt once, with a placeholder of what the modified value should be. I assume that the game pulls this number from the item schema. This makes sense to save time and space, but unfortunately it makes our job a lot harder.
My solution so far has been to edit the white text part of the description (which seems to be per-item) to add an addendum.
If I were to simply remove the "-10% firing speed" text from TF_English.txt, it would remove any firing speed penalty text from all weapons that have one.
It's not perfect, but as far as I know this is the best that we can do in these cases.
If anyone knows of a more elegant solution to this, please let me know. What I plan on doing is making this edited version of TF_English.txt public and adding it to a modpack that includes the 2013 Definitive HUD and the old weapon models and animations.
