Team Fortress 2 Update Topic

Anonymous · Jul 4, 2009

binge said:

as long as they dont suck as much as sawmill, it's okay
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An 5cp push map with the looks of sawmill/nuclues/lumberyard would be awesome.

Anonymous · Jul 4, 2009

pS. said:

An 5cp push map with the looks of sawmill/nuclues/lumberyard would be awesome.
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Hopefully it will contain saws. Then again enviromental bullshit like that isn't most likely not that which belongs on to a map for competitive players.

Fine, then I just stick with Arena_saw.

Anonymous · Jul 4, 2009

Interview with Robin Walker

TFPortal.de - Robin Walker Interview

A few days before the Sniper vs. Syp Update was released, we had the chance to ask TF-Founder Robin Walker 11 questions. Now Robin sent us the answers back for our relaunch. We know that some time ihas passed since the update. Because of that a few parts of the interview are a bit outdated. But don't worry we got lots of informations about other topics!

TFPortal.de: In another Interview you mentioned about a 10th Class for Team Fortress 2? Do you think that would be a good idea? We have now 3 Supporter Classes, 3 Offense Classes and 3 Defense Classes. Also the part of 9 Classes which we got in Team Fortress Classic.

We've got some ideas for further classes, but right now we're focusing on new game modes and items that are additive to all classes. A 10th class is something we'd really like to do, it's just an order of magnitude more work than adding a new unlockable. Also, the 9 classes provide a wide spread of gameplay for us, and often we find that new class ideas are more like subclasses of an existing class. In some cases, we're able to design an unlockable that provides a boost to that style of play, essentially creating the subclass in the game.

TFPortal.de: Do you think Valve will do a third part of Team Fortress ?

Right now we're still learning a bunch from the ongoing support of TF2.

TFPortal.de: Which Meet the Class video will be the next? Will there be more Videos like Meet the Sandvich, where you present the Weapons / Items?

Meet the Spy will be next. One of the reasons we did Meet the Sandvich was because we hadn't got our next Meet the X movie finished, and we wanted to still do something for the fans. Another reason was that we really enjoyed the way we could put a sandwich into an FPS and have it make sense, both from a gameplay and from an art direction standpoint. So, yeah, if we add another unlockable that's fun from a stylistic standpoint, I could see us doing another Meet the X movie for it.

TFPortal.de: In an E-Mail you mentioned a new demo type / format which you are developing. Many players have broken demo files after downloading new updates. Can you tell us a bit about it?

It's getting close to being releasable in a beta form. The idea is that after you die or finish a round, and it was a round you were particularly happy with (maybe you scored an awesome kill, or saved the entire team with an ubercharge), you can ask the server to send you a demo of it. The server then sends you a demo that it recorded, which has the complete game state instead of just what your client saw, and it's in a format that's robust and won't break as easily when we update the game. In addition, the format has a some side benefits, like supporting full backwards & forwards time scrubbing.

TFPortal.de: In the last Update you gave the Community an option for resetting their stats. Will it be possible to reset just broken parts of the Stats? Maybe in an upcoming update?

We're working on improving this. The first update will probably be to not reset your playtimes when you reset your stats.

TFPortal.de: TF2 Players reports often, that their performance declines with every new tf2 update. Do you know about the problems of Players with non high performance computers and are you working on solutions?

We gather a large amount of performance data from TF2 world-wide, and that data shows us that actually, performance in TF2 has improved over the time since release, even when we account for people upgrading their machines. That said, we do a lot of working with specific customers with obscure hardware setups to try and find out what's going on. Much of the time, it's someone who has a great graphics card and not so great a CPU, and unlike most games, TF2 is CPU bound, not GPU bound. Another common reason is that we really didn't design TF2 for more than 24 players, so we budgeted our memory & CPU usage around a max of 24. There's a large performance cliff (a place where performance takes a big dip) that occurs on some machines right around the 26 player mark. These are machines that perform well at 24 players, and become unplayable at 32.

TFPortal.de: Why you keep the pyro and his history so secret?

It makes the Meet the Pyro movie much more fun!

TFPortal.de: In the last Update a new backpack was included to the tf2 menu with a new place for Head Items? What can you say about that. Will TF2 become more like a MMORPG were we have to collect items?

One of the biggest pieces of feedback we get from customers is that they don't like the way the unlockables are tied to achievements. There are reasons why we had to do this in the past, but today we don't have to do that. So we're soon going to switch over to players being able to find items in a variety of ways. Because of that, players will start to find duplicates of items, and may try to store more items than we're prepared to allocate space for them on our backend. As a result, we introduced the backpack, which allows you to manage what items you want to keep, and throw out the others. The head slots are for a different set of new items that we'll be releasing soon, which are aimed at letting you customize your appearance a bit.

TFPortal.de: Which strategy you use in choosing the different classes for the achievement and unlock-updates? With the medic, valve tried to make the medic much more popular. But why then heavy, pyro and now the scout where choosen and not spy or sniper, soldier, engineer or demoman ?

Initially we chose classes based on popularity, but at this point, there are a variety of factors, ranging from ease of updating to the number of ideas we have already floating around for the class.

TFPortal.de: In many other Games we can collect achievements for collection 100 units of something. Or for 100 Kills, than 500, than 1000 etc. Why Valve dont ship some achievements like that for all classes to have much more achievements, but also for everybody something he could achieve. Something like 1.000.000 damage points as pyro for every class as well?

We initially designed these kinds of achievements to provide a buffer between the players who really played that class and the player who only checked it out for a few weeks after the class received its update pack. We backed off on them a bit once it became clear that the tying of achievements to unlockables meant players responded badly to this kind of achievement. Now that we've decoupled achievements & items in the Spy & Sniper pack, we'll probably rethink that decision.

TFPortal.de: How would you describe the development of TF2 in 2009? What can we expect this year?

Overall, you can just expect "more" from us. I think we're getting better and faster at providing this kind of service, and hopefully the result of that is you get more new experiences in TF2.
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Source
http://www.tfportal.de/?site=article_details&id=61&lang=en

Anonymous · Jul 4, 2009

I hope Meet the pyro will be good

And damn, you can really see that this team DOES something for it's game, unlike the team of l4d :roll:

Anonymous · Jul 5, 2009

binge said:

And damn, you can really see that this team DOES something for it's game, unlike the team of l4d :roll:
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Why? They do a lot. Like already developing the second game.

Anonymous · Jul 5, 2009

Cauchemar said:

Why? They do a lot. Like already developing the second game.
Click to expand...

When the first game isn't even finished yet*

you forgot that part

Anonymous · Jul 15, 2009

And now back on topic

A required update for Team Fortress 2 is now available. The specific changes include:

Linux Dedicated Server
* Improved connection logic to help servers that aren't automatically reconnecting to Steam.

Engine
* Fixed seeing error dialogs if the "-nocrashdialog" command line parameter is present.

Team Fortress 2
* Added an optional per-map particle manifest called <mapname>_particles.txt, which should be located in the maps directory, so map authors can load custom particle files.
* Fixed minicrits resulting in reduced damage for weapons at close ranges.
* Fixed the Cloak and Dagger not regenerating at the correct rate.
* Fixed setinfo exploit that allowed restricted convars to be set while connected to a server.
* Fixed tournament mode being interrupted if mp_timelimit hits before both stopwatch rounds have been played.
* Fixed "jointeam unassigned" exploit.
* Fixed being able to respawn during the chat time before a level change.
* Fixed "sensitivity" ConVar not capping the upper value which sometimes caused a server crash.
* Prevented some exploits based on mat_dxlevel being changed in-game.
* Updated ripple effects for water drips to improve performance.
Click to expand...

Doelwit · Jul 15, 2009

You forgot some stuff.

this one is quite important for our linux servers:

Improved connection logic to help servers that aren't automatically reconnecting to Steam
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Means they're working on the bug the loadout sometimes is not working on linux servers.

Doelwit · Jul 15, 2009

Was a secret update after the initial one, was not posted anywhere:

0.02% c:\servers\tf2/orangebox\tf\maps\graphs\cp_dustbowl.ain
0.04% c:\servers\tf2/orangebox\tf\maps\graphs\cp_gravelpit.ain
48.69% c:\servers\tf2/orangebox\tf\maps\graphs\tc_hydro.ain
100.00% c:\servers\tf2/orangebox\tf\particles\water.pcf
Click to expand...

Anonymous · Jul 15, 2009

Doelwit said:

Was a secret update after the initial one, was not posted anywhere:

0.02% c:\servers\tf2/orangebox\tf\maps\graphs\cp_dustbowl.ain
0.04% c:\servers\tf2/orangebox\tf\maps\graphs\cp_gravelpit.ain
48.69% c:\servers\tf2/orangebox\tf\maps\graphs\tc_hydro.ain
100.00% c:\servers\tf2/orangebox\tf\particles\water.pcf
Click to expand...

Click to expand...

I dont get it

Anonymous · Jul 15, 2009

i'm guessing their giving the full blu prints for some of their existing maps again?

Anonymous · Jul 16, 2009

Yea, I read it on the blog a few weeks ago. They would add the full map stuff of older maps in the source/orange box SDK and would continue to do that with other maps too. Weirdly enough, that post has since been replaced with a post about new avatars. Oh well, at least they know their priorities.

Jer9 · Jul 16, 2009

They already gave us the maps in SDK, So i don't think this is about that.
The particles/water.pcf are the improved water effects, I think.
and the AIN files are.uhm..this:

An AIN file is a nodegraph; it can either be automatically generated or made from info_nodes placed by hand in the level. AIN files are used by NPC's to navigate around their enviroment. If there is no existing AIN file specific to that map, or if it was generated for an older version of that map, the AIN file ( <MAP_NAME>.ain ) is generated by the game. The message "Node graph out of date. Rebuilding..." is seen at the beginning of that map if the AIN file was built or re-built.

source: http://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/AIN
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Anonymous · Jul 21, 2009

They are probably either making bots, or you can get a WoW like adventure.
I like the new tf2 avatars though.

Anonymous · Jul 21, 2009

A new interview delivered from the land of the moose

Exclusive Interview with Valve's Robin Walker

Tuesday, 21 July 2009 09:02 Graham
CommunityFortress.com writer MMZ>eXtine emailed Valve's Team Fortress 2 Lead Designer, Robin Walker, and asked him some interesting questions. His exclusive answers are below:

Q: Much to the delight of fans and customers, Valve has always believed in ensuring the longevity of their titles. Counter-strike's continued popularity is in large part due to the competitive scene that has developed around it, what are Valve's thoughts on the competitive TF2 scene at large?

A: We're excited to see the steady growth of the TF2 competitive scene around the world, and we try to keep track of what we can do to help it. So far, most of that help has taken the form of feature additions to the game, but in the future I think we'd like to get more insight into what else we can do. In particular, I'd like to build some more bridges to organizers within the competitive community, which is something we've tried to do but still continue to have trouble with.

As an example of the kind of work we could do for them, several of the competitive organizations have built external tools, server mods, and scripts to help organize & run their tournaments. We'd like to see if we could move some of those systems directly into the game.

Q: The Team Fortress 2 community has produced many great videos of their own, such as EgadPit's "Soldja Boy", the Scout advertising the Slap Chop, and the countless highlight/training videos. While you recently discussed an upcoming change in demo formats to enable users to easily get videos of exceptional plays, are there also going to be changes in the ways that SourceTV works and how these demos are edited in game?

A: Initially, the new demo system won't affect the SourceTV system, but we'd like to unify them at some point. Demos in the new format can be converted into a robust, "fatter" demo file that won't break, and supports a much greater editing capability than anything we've done before. In the first release the in-game demo viewer will remain similar to the previous version, albeit with full featured time scrubbing capability. In later releases we'll be improving the editing functionality within that viewer.

Q: Obviously a large focus of TF2 and the best way for new players to get involved with the game are the Public servers. These servers usually swing towards easy to understand maps that accommodate large player counts, such as: Dustbowl, Gold Rush, Badwater Basin, 2Fort, and Pipeline. With the vast majority of competitive TF2 matches being played using a 6v6 setup on CP maps such as Badlands, Granary, Well and smaller custom maps, how has this dichotomy affected the map making philosophy of the TF2 design team?

A: The quick summary is that it makes us less efficient, because it almost forces us to divide our workload up into work for each group. It's also disappointing that a couple of our most popular public game modes (Dustbowl style Attack/Defense, and Payload) don't really work at all with small team sizes. Still, we're optimistic as always, and are trying to tackle some of the problems that cause this split. We've got a map where we're trying out areas that modify themselves based on the number of players in the game, in the hopes that both public & competitive players can use it. We've got another new Attack/Defense map that's aimed at shorter, fixed time limit so that competitive teams can play a full round of it within the same timeframe that they play a 5 point CP match currently (unlike Dustbowl/Payload where matches could take over an hour). And we're got new 5 point CP & CTF maps in the works that we know will work for everyone.

Q: This split between the well designed casual public server gameplay and the desires of more competitive gamers has always been a bit of a sore point for TF2. Do you feel like there needs to be an attempt to reconcile the two worlds of TF2 or does the competitive scene need to be accommodated separately from the public scene?

A: Clearly the two groups have different goals, and from that different desires, so our job is to try and find ways to please each of them without hurting the other. While doing that, we try and be as efficient as possible by making changes that serve both. That said, we occasionally do work specifically for one of the groups because the work is valuable enough even without the wide appeal. Examples of that would be things like the Payload game mode for public players, or Tournament mode & its associated server settings for competitive players.

Q: It has been announced that Left 4 Dead will be implementing a match making system where four players can search for a Versus game together, it has also been previously reported that some of the L4D match making system might make its way into Team Fortress 2, are there plans to implement a similar system for Team Fortress 2 featuring 6v6 matches or even the "Highlander" game mode to help promote the competitive pick up game scene?

A: We'd like to use the L4D matchmaking work, but they're still iterating on it right now, so we'll see where they end up. Highlander mode is always something we thought was really neat, but it wasn't clear how valuable it'd be, because public players seem to want more than 9 players per team, and competitive players want less. Since the class limit feature lets you essentially organize it yourself, we thought we'd done enough. If you want extra features or support around that though, feel free to send us your thoughts.

Q: When the random drop system was implemented with the Spy/Sniper update pack there was a backlash against it due to the random nature of unlocking the newly released weapons. There was also speculation that the system could be used to dole out randomized items in the fashion of Diablo and other RPGs. While the ability to unlock the new weapons through achievements satiated the hardcore players, did the backlash negate any such plans to expand the random drop system or is the current implementation and the help it gives new players all that was intended?

A: I think we've learned that the random drop system is only good for some types of things, like the rare cosmetic hats. It's good for delivering items to newer players over time, so they're not swamped with choices when they're starting out, and they're not required to grind achievements to get them once they reach the point where they want to start making strategic choices. For competitive players, it's obviously a bad way to deliver items. At the very least, future packs will allow you to use achievements to get the new items, but we might move to a mode where we just give them to you. As part of our goal of supporting tournaments more, I think we'll probably add better tools for them to control exactly what players can & can't use within matches.

Q: With only two more class movies left to produce and 3 classes waiting to receive unlockable weapons (Soldier, Demo, and Engineer) we are getting closer and closer to the end of announced future content for TF2. Can TF2 fans continue to expect major modifications to the game or will most of the updates be of a smaller nature?

A: We don't really know yet, to be honest. We've still got lots of ideas for what we could do with TF2, but in the short term we'll continue to do what we've done up until now: not plan too far ahead, so we can remain fluid and reactive to the feedback we get from players. We already have a couple of large updates in the works that aren't tied to a specific class, so we'll see what you think of those.

Q: While obviously a smaller portion of the TF2 audience, there is a significant audience of console players who love TF2 and are devoted to it despite the archaic version they are playing. Any comment concerning updates for the Xbox 360 version of TF2?

A: We have a title update in certification right now that will address the server cheating that's going on, and adds a few of the requested settings to run matches. Unfortunately, we still don't have an update on shipping the class packs.

Thanks again to MMZ>eXtine and Robin Walker for their time spent on this interview.
Click to expand...

Source
http://communityfortress.com/tf2/news/exclusive-interview-with-valves-robin-walker.php

FaN pushback will be recoded too

Valve to "revisit" FaN coding

INFO:
Â» http://img300.imageshack.us/img300/5429/robin.jpg

A reply email has come from Robin Walker, team leader at Valve, saying they are happy with the feedback from an extra 10% damage boost to the force a nature, but are willing to go over how the pushback works. Many people are unhappy about losing all speed when jumping, or even walking normally, from large distances. It only takes a single pellet to significantly reduce peoples speed.

Original email here: http://img300.imageshack.us/img300/5429/robin.jpg
Click to expand...

Anonymous · Jul 21, 2009

stupid noam, should have slapped him in the face when i had the chance this morning...

Anonymous · Jul 22, 2009

?

Anonymous · Jul 22, 2009

nub on a mission

Anonymous · Jul 23, 2009

Soldier update next:

Doelwit · Jul 23, 2009

Ok, cool.
but how correct is that image?
the blog and rss feed of http://www.teamfortress.com does not show that message (yet).

Anyways, soldier update.
Seems logical, not that many to update anymore.

King of the hill playstyle.
Hope it will succeed since the current maps available for that gametype are , except for 2 or 3 , pretty shitty.

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