For general feedback about the game.

Visit the support site for any issues you may be having with the game or Steam.

January 25, 2010 - TF2 Team

In the latest update, we've finally fixed the Double Crouch Jump bug—a longstanding issue involving Scout not being able to double crouch jump without looking like his legs are made of raw bacon strips held up in a wind tunnel:



Throughout Team Fortress 2's years-long release and update cycle, many people have asked us, "Seriously, how could you guys not have fixed that yet?" The majority of these queries are directed to TF2 animator Matthew Russell, who is technically responsible for fixing this kind of thing, and most of them pull no punches. "Is it because Matthew Russell is too stupid to fix it? Why would Valve even hire someone with a horseshoe-shaped divot in their skull?" is an email we see a lot. "Does Matthew Russell have a disease that makes him lazy?" is another popular one. An astonishing number of them are simply a .jpeg of Google Maps with Matt's house ominously circled. The rest could be summed up as a long, unbroken string of expletives and grammatically questionable racial slurs.

What a lot of people don't know is that this "bug" isn't a bug at all, but rather an embarrassing result of the degenerative leg disease our motion capture actor, Del Bluskin, has bravely endured for over a decade now, which has turned the lower half of his skeleton into something that looks like two raw bacon strips held up in a wind tunnel. To be honest, Del's been a part of the Valve family for so long, we just didn't have the heart to fire him simply because his ailment had rendered him grossly incompetent at his own job. To be even more honest, we didn't have the heart to engage in a long verbal sparring match with Valve's legal team, who told us that under no circumstances could we fire Del.

Luckily, things have a funny way of working themselves out for the best. Del was hit by a bus this morning, and our new mocap guy, Phil, is a sharp, enthusiastic go-getter with a functioning skeleton. Jump forward an hour, and here we are with an upgrade that finally addresses the Double Crouch Jump bug that has long plagued the Scout-playing faithful. Enjoy, and in the words of animator Matthew Russell, "Anyone wants me, I'm gonna snag a couple z's in the server room. If Newell asks, one of my kids has chicken pox again."

In non-crazy-legs-related news, our friends at TF2maps.net have just finished up their Swamp Theme expansion. Head on over and download it today.

January 13, 2010 - TF2 Team

Today we're unveiling the TF2 Contribution site. This nifty site will allow anyone who's made a custom piece of TF2 content to submit it to us, with a view to it appearing in-game. Many of you have been building fantastic TF2 work for a while now, and we wanted a way for you to get it in front of all TF2 players, and for everyone to see that you were the one that built it.

Also, we've now added an official feed for harvesting TF2 inventory data for all the folks out there building nifty web pages around items. Technical details are as follows:

• The TF2 client installation now includes tf\scripts\items\items_game.txt. This is the item dictionary most of you have been working with for a while now.
• A JSON feed describing the TF2 items in an account can be reached at this URL:
  http://steamcommunity.com/id/<vanity URL>/tfitems?json=1
  or
  http://steamcommunity.com/profiles/<steam ID>/tfitems?json=1

Use the definition indices for item types, attribute types, and quality levels in the JSON feed to index into the items_game.txt dictionary, and you're good to go. Note that it will respect the privacy settings on steam profiles, so it won't report the inventories of players who've marked the profile as private.


Erectin a dispenser

December 21, 2009 - Mike Booth

With the success of the AI systems of Left 4 Dead, we've been continuing to develop these technologies to create new kinds of game experiences. Team Fortress 2 is an excellent "sandbox" for explorations of this sort, and we've been quietly doing so for much of this last year. Some of the results of these explorations are TF "bots" — AI-driven player proxies with simulated humanlike senses, reaction times, and tactics. Although the TFBots are not yet complete, they play a pretty decent game of King of the Hill.

We thought you might enjoy testing your skill against these work-in-progress digital killing machines.

We'd also like to hear your thoughts on how the bots are behaving. Although we have our list of behavior bugs to tackle (this is a beta after all), we're sure you'll discover issues we haven't yet seen. If you'd like to give us bot feedback, you can post your thoughts in our new Bot Feedback sub-forum, or send us an e-mail at tfbots@valvesoftware.com. In either case, please tell us the three things you hate most about the bots, and the three things you like best about them (as well as anything else you think we should know).

Since this is a beta test, the TFBots are only functional on these King of the Hill maps: koth_viaduct, koth_sawmill, and koth_nucleus. They don't understand the rules of multiple point capturing, cart pushing, or flag getting... yet. There's also no interface in the game to accessing them yet (we'll add one in an update shortly), so you'll need to access them manually.



• To add bots to your game, use the console command tf_bot_add. This will drop a random bot onto a random team (assuming there is a free player slot). The tf_bot_add command can also take up to three optional arguments: <count>, <class>, and <team>, in any order. For example, tf_bot_add 10 will add 10 random bots to the game with auto-assigned teams. Typing tf_bot_add pyro blue will add a Pyro to the blue team. Entering tf_bot_add red 5 will add 5 random bots to the red team. The command tf_bot_add red 3 heavyweapons will add three heavies to the red team.
  
• In order to put specific bots on specific teams (for a bots-vs-humans game, for example), you may want to disable automatic team balancing. To do this, enter mp_autoteambalance 0 followed by mp_teams_unbalance_limit 0.
  
• To remove a bot, use the console command kick <bot name>. To remove all of the bots in the game, use the command tf_bot_kick all.

TFBots are "players", and take up player slots. They run the exact same code that human players do, moving and firing weapons by pressing "virtual buttons". The bots have simulated humanlike senses, and only know what they see, hear, and touch. They also have realistic reaction times and aiming limitations. They don't "cheat" or use omniscient knowledge of the server state to make their decisions.

If you're interested in the technical details, give this a read-through.

Update Update

December 21, 2009 - Shawn Zabecki

We've got one more update to go out to our backend item system. After that, we'll be granting all the missing items that weren't granted properly when you finished achievements.


And the Winner is...

December 17, 2009 - TF2 Team

...the Soldier!


Sorry, Demomen. You fought the good fight and kept it far closer than anybody could have predicted. But in the end, at the noon Thursday deadline, the Soldiers kept their razor-thin lead, with 6,406,065 killed Demomen to the Demo's score of 6,372,979 killed Sollys.

What a week it's been. We're really big fans of both the police and the fire department, so it's been a real treat for us, as they've been here pretty much non-stop since last Thursday. There were the arguments between Demo and Soldier-supporting staffers; that unexplained knifing in the elevator; Drew Wolf; and a host of other calamities that resulted from the creation of this massive update. At one point we even saw a police officer and a fireman in a fist fight over who was more mad at us.

Anyway, it was all worth it to give you this update. Which is now live. Enjoy.




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