If you've ever felt an particular affection for a weapon in counter-strike, rejoice! With these stickers, any skin in the game can be anthropomorphized with a pair of starry eyes gazing at you lovingly, unblinkingly, forever!




Now, as you may have noticed, this version is labeled "experimental" because there are a few noticeable flaws with it. The most evident of these is the scanlines which appear between each row of pixels in the animated "tile". Now, try as I might, I'm not able to get these to go away, and I've realised that the issue is texture filtering. In Source engine, it was possible to flag a .vtf to use point sampling (nearest neighbor) but this doesn't appear to be an option in source 2's .vtex.

At the moment I think this effect looks pretty good when displayed at high resolutions (such as in the inventory) but it will break at lower resolutions because of the interpolation between values on the holomask texture in particular.

To demonstrate this, I made something that works approximately the same as the CS2 sticker shader in blender, which you can see above. This version is rendered the same resolution you'll see the image if you're looking at this on desktop. The "scanlines" become particularly severe at this resolution, and it destroys the effect. The problem shows up the same when you're running the game at a low resolution. In the simulated version, by enabling nearest neighbor texture filtering, the issue is pretty much completely resolved, and if this were made an option somehow within CS2's workbench, then I think some pretty cool stickers could result.

Either way, hope you like the design.

-Ezi