Powerlord

I'm at class and I'm bored, so here's more achievements.

I actually brought up this patch like two pages back, although I distilled it just to the bits I thought people would find interesting.

Considering that they've had one for each of the previous 3 class updates? Yes.

It's also on the official Valve Developer wiki: http://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Valve_Time

Oh, I forgot to mention, I checked the Spy thing when we were playing last night... apparently you only have to begin decloaking before you can pick up the intel, so it's not *that* much of a change... just right-click when you're standing on it and you immediately grab it rather than having to wait the 3 seconds to decloak completely.

So, yeah, new minor patch today. Valve announced they'd be doing this one last week. The highlights: - Weapon loadout is now stored on Valve's central servers... and a new keybind has been added to only view the current class's weapon upgrades. Either manually bind a key to it (or to the default "m" key) or reset your binds to use it. - You can now have a custom crosshair. - They re-fixed Natascha... and this time it seems to work correctly, as you slow down a LOT when hit by it. - Heavy's minigun now has a less-wide scatter, meaning you should hit what's directly in front of you more often. - Cloaked Spies can no longer pick up the intelligence. - Soldiers now carry 20 rockets instead of 16. - The kritzkrieg now works on the sniper rifle. - Tournament mode now has a command to limit how many people can play a specific class. This had to be done with mods before. - The Pyro Flare Gun now does 30 direct damage, up from 20. - The way crits are calculated has changed drastically... it's now more skill based, with only a 2% base chance (down from 5%). - Fixed the health of upgraded teleporters... both now get the health upgrade instead of just the one the Engineer is hitting. - Restricted a few physics engine changes to server admins only. I assume this is to fix an exploit. I also fixed the maplist for the nominate and rtv commands... if you see any map problems with those or the admin map commands, let me know. On another subject, I was recently asked to disable Pure on the server. I'm afraid I can't do that, as it's the servers defense mechanism against material hacking. For those of you who don't know what material hacking is, it's something people do that "might allow themselves to see through walls, make enemy models larger or brighter, or make certain sounds louder, thus giving them an advantage while playing." Having played on another server that had Pure disabled (and you probably know which one I'm referring to), I can tell you that it's really annoying... I play Spy a lot, and a person who can see you when you're cloaked is irritating to say the least.

I was introduced to the Achievement Generator just recently. Here's some I created:

Speaking of patches, the last TF2 patch didn't fix the map load bug or Natascha bug.

I was on the other team, and frankly we sucked. I was the only person to get any Intel captures for the entire map, iirc. Not only that, but BLU controlled the center of Turbine for almost the entire time in both rounds... although we only lost because the round timer ran out in the first round when the captures were 2 BLU, 1 RED. Map time ran out during round two. I was laughing when someone on my team was telling me that "If you can't play spy, change classes!" (which I actually did, which is also why my score is so low... tried playing Demoman and Heavy, both of which I suck at), but then I realized a bit later that I was the only person up to that point who had gotten the Intel. Edit: Here's my scoreboard file for said map. I heard from atmuh that Gameservers apparently no longer auto-reboots servers after applying updates, so it was probably on the new version after I told it to reboot. On a side note, we can now set the default map for the server. Just to be different, I set it to pl_goldrush... but if anyone has any other suggestions, feel free to say them.

Updating now... no idea how long it'll take, though. Edit: The server hasn't even gone down for update yet. I have no idea what's going on with it.

So, anyway, patch notes. The highlights: 'Changed AutoTeam to give new players to the attackers on attack/defend maps if the teams are even' <-- So, BLU always gains people first on PL and CP attack/defend if someone hits the Random button 'Fixed Natascha not getting the proper 75% of damage and slightly increased the strength of Natascha's slowdown' 'Fixed players getting stuck in the "prepare to respawn..." countdown loop' 'Fixed teleporter entrance/exit effects being drawn when they don't have a matching teleporter entrance/exit' 'Fixed cloaked spies having a particle-beam effect while standing next to a dispenser that's healing them' <-- 'Fixed clients using reloadresponsesystems, sv_soundemitter_flush, sv_soundemitter_filecheck, sv_findsoundname, and sv_soundscape_printdebuginfo to lag/crash servers' 'Fixed client "timeout on mapchange" problem' 'Fixed setinfo exploit' 'Marked the r_aspectratio ConVar as a cheat' and for map developers: 'Added flag to the gamerules entity so map authors can override the HUD type being used. Allows map authors to force CTF or CP HUD to be used if they mix CTF/CP entities in the map' There is a slight problem even if ctp_epsilon is updated, though: 'Added check in CTF HUD to make sure it doesn't point at disabled capture zones when the player is carrying the flag. Allows map authors to have more than one capture zone for each team in the map' Which means if ctp_epsilon is changed to CTF, it won't point anywhere when you're carrying the flag if the other team controls the point. Note that I still haven't been home yet, so unless Bahamut has updated the server, it's still the old version.

No idea, I didn't play yesterday. I know there's supposed to be that map change fix this week (should have been today), but I'm in a computer lab right now and not at home to check it.

There was another blog post today on the Official TF2 site. Apparently there will be a bugfix patch tomorrow and another patch later this changes where unlockable choices are stored. They didn't say when the Scout update would be out, only that it's nearly complete and they are already starting work on the next patch. Rumor has it that the Scout update will also include another new map, but I don't think that was actually confirmed.

The server managed to not have the long map load-time bug while I was on last night. Rumor has it that Valve is going to release a fix for that bug very soon. For those of you who have no idea what I'm talking about, sometimes the server will take in excess of 30 seconds to switch maps, which disconnects everyone due to the automatic timeout.

I fixed an issue where files whose name were not in all lowercase on the download mirror weren't able to be downloaded... mainly cp_2Skyscraper_b3.

I made a few minor changes to try to eliminate the weird map load time that pops up sometimes between maps (everyone times out while waiting for the server to load the next map). We'll see if it fixes (or at least reduces) the problem.

Uncompressing the maps has fixed the problem with them not showing up in Sourecemod.

There was an issue with our custom maps not showing up in Sourcemod's admin and voting tools. I'll log on later to see if uncompressing them fixed the problem.

Whoa, I just noticed when telling Secret Agent Man the new IPs for some servers exactly how close the IPs for OCR and Spengboob are... they're in the same /24 block... meaning the first three octets are the same. OCR: 8.9.31.206:27015 Spengboob: 8.9.31.14:27015

Well, thanks to Monday being a state holiday and some confusion over whom was watching my parents dog while they're on vacation, I ended up with a 4-day weekend (Saturday - Tuesday) from work... although I still have one college class on Tuesday.

I was on for a short bit, but no one joined me. :/ I find myself playing more on Atmuh's server lately (and muting on average 5 people) simply because people actually play there.

That's my fault, I apparently uploaded the wrong arena config file to the new server, then someone switched the server to an arena map. Speaking of which, I still think it's stupid that arena doesn't just use the normal server config.

Ah, good. Lets see... 1300 hours is... 2300 hours (11pm) EST because of the 14 hour time difference (+0900 to -0500).

You could give me a patch, but I don't know what I'd do with it. Also: Saturday. OCR Night?

Since it's a shame to have the new server just sitting there unplayed, maybe we should play on it tomorrow or something.