Alex Petraglia from Primotech has reported on the talk given by Jason Mitchell, one of Valve’s leading graphics engineers, on Team Fortress 2’s art style and visual technology. There is a lot of interesting stuff in there, especially if you’re interested in the game development side of things.
The real payload though, are the details on the “Meet The Scout” video that should be out in the next couple of weeks from Valve. There is even an MP3 recording of the whole session. Although you can’t see the Scout video, you CAN hear the audio of it - albeit a little muffled. Skip forward to about 43:00. They play it again a little later in as well.
There is a separate write up just on the Meet The Scout video as well.
“Grass grows, birds fly, sun shines, and brother…I hurt people.”
There seems to be a lot of Heavy abuse by the sounds of all the screaming.
Personal favorite has to be the standout group shot of the Team Fortress 2 crew rocking out to a packed mosh pit. After messing with Garrys Mod for a bit, I’ve got a lot of appreciation for setting up this kind of shot.
Welcome to the TF2 Strategy Class Guides index. Here you will find links to all the class related strategy guides on tf2strategy.com.
Each comprehensive class guide features a full overview of each class and their weapons, the roles that the class fulfills best, in-depth strategy regarding the various methods of play, a content-rich roll of tips to improve your effectiveness in combat, and an article detailing specific strategies to utilise when engaging each class of enemy.
Each page of every guide is also infused with crops of vibrant TF2 screenshots to more effectively illustrate the issues under analysis, all linking to full size, high resolution versions presented in our very own TF2S Gallery. This is designed not only to more fully express important strategic concepts, but to enhance your reading experience as you wade through the veritable swamp of considered text.
While you’re there, check out the Gallery page as well. Some nice screenshots in there. I snagged a few for my wallpaper collection
Just like this sniper is about to learn the hard way, if you don’t keep your head up and look around, bad things can come up and give you a nasty surprise!
A lot of people I know are what I would call ‘crisis junkies’. They thrive on finding fires and do a great job of managing those fires and putting them out…then they move on to the next fire. Sometimes, when there’s not a fire, they’ll start one just so they can put it out.
It’s a great skill set to have, but if you can’t pull yourself away from the details on a regular basis and look around you, you are going to have problems. It’s not easy to do, but it’s the single best thing I know of that will help you consciously grow your business.
There’s not necessarily anything wrong with starting fires though. I reckon the other thing to learn from TF2 is that a lot of the time sneaking up behind your competition, running in, setting everything on fire, causing chaos and confusion, then getting out quick can be quite fun and productive.
Dominic from over at Something Emporium has produced a set of mock tips on how to play the medic in TF2. These guys must have found my secret game play techniques book…
When you’re met with such criticism, you have a few options. The poor medic laughs it off. The mediocre medic just keeps on playing. Let me educate you as to the technique of the AWESOME medic.
Have a pen and pad sitting beside your keyboard. Any time anyone (yes, _anyone_) criticises you, mark their name down. Put it in nice, bold lettering, so that you can see it at a glance.
And the next time that player is calling for a medic, the next time that player is on thirty health and burning rapidly away to zero, the next time they’re looking directly at you and want nothing more than to be healed, the next time their screams of “MEDIC!” fill your chat window: that time, turn your back on them. Find the nearest scout or sniper, and heal them instead.
Josh from The Serious Nerd, has written up a great tips list for lovers of the point and click adventure known as “playing sniper”.
The coolest part is the illustrations to go along with it
Absolutely essential for all Snipers is the fast weapon change. When turned on, you won’t bring up the list of weapons when you press 1, 2, or 3 trying to switch. This is very important because when you suddenly find yourself being attacked when you’re zoomed in with your Sniper Rifle, you’ll need every second you’ve got to turn around and start sinking bullets or blades into the guy. Pressing the button twice to change weapons is just simply too slow, so make sure you turn on the fast weapon change in the options menu.
Just remember to use this power for good instead of evil.
No, I’m not talking about the Badlands inbreds, but to an exciting new gamemode and map recently released by citrusmirakel - a “circular control point” map called… Circlejerk.
The idea is that it’s control style play like Granary or Well, but instead of capturing points in a linear motion, they are arranged in a closed circle:
The map works with different mechanics then standard CP maps, with four CPs laid out in a circle, and each team is trying to attack the point to their right while defending the point to their left. The map’s been fairly popular on a couple servers, though I do wish a couple more would give it a shot (hence the e-mail).
I haven’t had a chance to play it yet, but I think I’ll have to go and check it out.
You can go download the map from PoE Can’t Aim! Here’s a few screenshots to whet your appetite.
Another week, another Control Point. This time they’re discussing the map that is the most underrated IMHO - Hydro. A lot of people don’t like playing it, probably due to the complexity and constant changing of sides. I’m kinda a fan, but its hard to find full servers running it due to its lack of popularity, so I don’t actually get to play it that much.
Shoutout to the Control Point guys for referring to ubercharged.net as being better than google, and for referring to me as crazy, insane, and mad.
You can go download it from Control Point. Be warned though, the Spencer impersonation sounds like Pinocchio from Shrek (you’ll know what I mean when you hear it).
This week the podcast is a bit leaky from the breaking of dams in Hydro, and of course Spencer missing in action. But instead of putting the podcast on hiatus, we decided to bring it to you with just the 3 remaining hosts. Click!
So far I think I like the new Badlands Team Fortress 2 map. The routes are laid out to provide some interesting approaches and flanking opportunities, and the diverse terrain and vertical aspect is a lot of fun. From what I’ve seen, one of the biggest strengths is that no one class is able to dominate and you can play as almost anything and still useful in most areas. You just need to find the right tactics and think about how you are playing - it is a good thinking map, and good tactics and strats seem to make all the difference.
Which is why it’s so frustrating that I haven’t been able to have a decent game on it yet with all the idiots that have come out of the woodward with it’s release. It’s like all the kids played TF2 at the start, got bored, went back to Counter Strike, and now they’ve come back to TF2 again. GAH.
The worst thing seems to be the glaring underground-turret exploit. I think it took about 0.0246 seconds for the griefers to find that one after the map was released. I had really hoped Valve had learned their lesson with the problems in Gravelpit a while back and guarded against that kind of exploit a bit more.
This f**k here was s**ting me off royally last night:
Just in case anyone is running a server, and wants to lay down the ban stick (I’m looking at YOU Gamearena). His steam unique ID is STEAM_0:1:17433520, and his steam profile page is here
Another minor annoyance were the TeamRoomba wannabes from WAPS stacking up one team, then all rolling engineer and being useless. Then being a dick about it on voice comms. Amazing how tough these kids act when they are safely anonymous on the interweb AND they have their buddies to back up their anti-social BS. At least Roomba had some style and made it funny.
I think I might just lay low till things go back to normal again. (Or maybe I’ll just be forced to anyway)
Currently I’m running Team Fortress 2 on a MacBook Pro dual booting between Windows and OS X using boot camp. Now I’m on a glorious mission to add Ubuntu into the mix for a triple boot setup.
Its entirely possible that I’ll balls the whole thing up and end up with a MacBrick for a few days till I get it sorted. So if I suddenly go AWOL, and am not playing TF2, and don’t respond to emails, thats why (not that much different to normal really…)
I was kinda happy with the setup I had using Mac OS X for development work and Windows for gaming and pissing around cross platform testing. Anyway, then I got shifted over to a Ruby on Rails project (which is a bit more interesting than the back end Java development work I was doing), and I need to run against Oracle. Which Mac hates. So I need to boot into Ubuntu to get any work done. Man, this stuff shouldn’t be this hard.
Update
It all went quite smoothly in the end. Only lost one business day to getting it all set up (I was expecting way worse). The only gotcha I encountered was resizing the OS X partition to create the Windows and Linux partitions. Diskutil in OS X lets you resize partitions dynamically without splatting the current drive contents, but it doesn’t play so nice when you’ve been using the partition for a while and you’ve already got fragmented data all the way up into the areas that the new partitions will require.
I bought a copy of iDefrag, and ran the off line compaction operation. That cleared it all right up.
After that it was another day or so getting the Ubuntu environment set up for development (installing Ruby, Rails, Oracle, NetBeans etc), and I was good to go with a nice triple boot system.
Some serious TF2 fan cosplay going on here. joshspiderman238 and auss dressing in their homemade pyro and spy outfits. Both are pretty good replicas, but the pyro is particularly impressive (I mean, you just wear a suit and a balaclava, and you’re a spy. Not hard).
Dunno about the Right Said Fred dancing, but hey, they’re enjoying themselves in the privacy of their own home.
MiniKraft has assembled more Lego TF2 goodness. We saw the Lego scenes from TF2 a while back, but now we’ve got a sweet recreation of the TF2 preview video.
Spotted over at onlinegamer.se (which is in Swedish, I think - dunno. I just look at the pictures.)
As I’m pretty sure everyone in the world saw the automatic update, and multiple news items from Steam, I didn’t bother posting anything about the new Badlands map. However, that didn’t stop everyone sending me news about it.
Names have been changed to protect the stupid:
MADLEP VAVLE HAS DONE BADWORLD MAP. U SHUD POST ON UBRCHARGED AND LINK TO MY SITE LOL
THX <name removed>
Cool. Done.
Anyway, I had the first play through last night. Seems like a good open map. Lots of variety, and different routes to take. Pyros and spies both seemed to be doing quite well. This video from omfgninja got produced in record time, and shows some of that.
Only problem seems to be that the exploiters have already figured out how to build underground turrets in one section. Oh well, hopefully Valve will patch that out soon.
Daedalus (or EvilDaedalus, or whatever he goes by officially) has been at it again with his prolific tutorializing of the black arts of Team Fortress 2. After showing us how to play Spy, and how to play Pyro, he has pumped out a feature length schooling on being a cocky, obnoxious, little brat playing scout.
Finally here. After a tf2 update rendered all of my footage useless, I had to recap a lot of footage, and ended up with more than I could manage. Anyway, I couldn’t fit everything into 10 minutes, so I had to split it up into two parts.
I’m just glad to get this out into the open so I can get working on other projects and free up disk space. It’s somewhat rushed but I still hope you can learn something from it.
I’ve also started a public steam group centered on my new server:
And yes, I know the quality is horrible. I tried uploading it 3 times with 3 different codecs. Go watch the stage6 version
I was umming and aahing over whether to embed the stage6, or the youtube version. In the end I went with youtube, cause the stage6 one was 300mb, and my ISP plan gets capped real easy. What is everyone’s preference for future reference?
Elvis!, Brent, and D4rkone all emailed me to point this one out before I was slack enough to get around to posting it. Cheers guys
bits bytes pixels & sprites has a couple of nice RED and BLU Team Fortress 2 wallpapers. I stuck one on each monitor. Nice, clean, and simple. Just what I like for a wallpaper.
With the most romantic pagan festival/rebranded Christian event of the calendar year just around the corner, we thought we’d throw up some Team Fortress 2 valentines that have been floating around the intertube.
Alexandria Neonakis over at Nuts and Beavers (oh god, google is gonna have a field day with search results when it indexes that URL…), has put up a bunch of kick ass TF2 valentines images.
As a gesture of love, I decided not to send one of these to my wife…
tehPete emailed through a link to a sweet as video he’s put together of him owning it up. Mostly as a spy, but with some demoman thrown into the mix as well. As we know from previous analysis, spy and demoman are the two most super awesome pro-classes in the hands of an expert - which they are here.
A compilation of some gameplay footage I took at the end of last year - arranged to music, for your enjoyment. It started life as another Tips video, but WMM kept crashing out and corrupting the save; after the umpteenth remake, it evolved into more of a gameplay video. TBH I wasn’t sure whether to upload it or not (I’m still not happy with it - the footage is two months old & imo I’m much better than this now), but after so many remakes it seemed a waste to just delete it!
tehPete also did the excellent “I, Spy” tutorial video a while back.
Watch it right through to the end to see the ridiculous dustbowl defense ownage.
Another TF2 rap video in the spirit of Soldier Boy. Soldier boy got an insane amount of popularity for some reason, but I reckon this one is better. Posted by superx107
Im your medic tf2 music video made by the 5e-community http://cs.5e-community.com/ using the song made by Captain Spalding which you can listen and download from his myspace page http://www.myspace.com/captainspaldinglive when everyone is saying medic at the start of the video a heavy was saying medic when it was actually suppose to be a demoman a small glitch in the video if anyone noticed
(I forget if I just found this one, or someone linked it to me, sorry for not crediting if you did! I’m getting old and my memory is going to crap)
