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Major Updates
September 21, 2009 - Saxton Hale
September 16, 2009 - Robin Walker
As with the first Left 4 Dead game, most of the TF2 team has moved over to help out Left 4 Dead 2 get through its final shipping steps. This time around, though, we've improved our process a little to ensure we can keep some people on TF2, enabling us to continue doing TF2 updates. We've been a bit slow on updating here, and there's plenty of stuff to talk about, so we might as well jump right in.
First off, a quick update on where we are with the character model and animation sources. After we got over our excitement of releasing them, we ran into a couple of problems:
- All the character modelers & animators are incredibly busy working on L4D2.
- None of our new .DMX file format tools have been released in the SDK yet, which are integral to working with these sources.
As a result, it's taken a bit more work than we'd originally intended. And to make sure that the work is being done right, we decided it'd be best to get one model out, if only so we could get your feedback on it before we went ahead and got the rest done. So today we're updating the Source SDK to include all the model and animation source for the Heavy. Take a look at it, and be sure to send us your thoughts.
Secondly, some community updates:
- The Dead Workers Party just released their 88th (!) TF2 podcast over at the Control Point podcast, the longest running TF-related podcast in the universe. There's a wealth of information there on updates, class strategies, new maps, and player shoutouts, as well as plenty of fun community stuff you can get involved in, like fan videos and art.
- The folks over at Ubercharged.net have finished their fantastic introduction to competitive TF2.
- The SourceOP guys keep working away on their nifty TF2 Backpack Viewer. It's great if you ever wanted to see what items your buddies are toting around. Or if you wanted to see Gabe's weapon that bans your Steam account if he kills you with it.
Finally, we've had a lot of requests to release the official set of "Ubercharged" avatars that Dhabih did for our internal TF2 clan. You can buff up your community profile by getting them from the Official TF2 Community page or grab the zip of them here.
September 2, 2009 - Erik Johnson
Over the next few days we'll be removing all TF2 items that were earned using external idling applications. We're going to adopt a zero tolerance policy for external applications used to manipulate the persistent item system. Due to us not having a policy in place prior to today, this time we're only removing the items earned through cheating the system. Going forward, if we find users using external applications, we'll remove all of their items. If you're interested, only about 4.5% of the players in TF2's community will be affected by this cleansing process.
Meanwhile, everyone who took the moral high road will soon be finding a new hat in their inventory. We've also significantly increased the chance of finding any of the existing hats.
We realize there is a high level of demand for items, and we're still working on systems to allow you to find them in new ways (via Trading, and crafting duplicates into desired items). However, we need to draw the line at running external applications.
August 21, 2009 - Corey Peters
We thought you might be interested in seeing some of the "behind the scenes" work that goes on in Team Fortress 2. The process usually starts with a team discussion: This helps us determine the goals of the map we're going to build. In this case, we wanted a game mode that had an intense, centralized experience with quick player turnaround. We liked some of the facets of Arena mode, but it was clear that many players don't like to wait for the next round to play.
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August 13, 2009 - Robin Walker
Go check it out, and keep your eyes peeled for goodies!
*Has probably already been done by someone in the TF2 community. Please don’t sue us.
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August 12, 2009 - TF Announcer
I would like to thank you for emailing us to point out that Viaduct is not the first TF2 map to feature snow. More importantly, I would like to thank you for stopping.
Immediately.
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August 12, 2009 - TF2 Team
The Classless Update continues to class up the joint with some previews, including a brand new game mode and some retooled classic maps. Check it out, then fire back on the forums.
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August 11, 2009 - Robin Walker
After setting a new standard for Lack of Class in an FPS with the addition of Jarate (the jar-based Karate), we've raised the bar on lowering the tone even further with the first ever Classless Update!
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August 4, 2009 - Mike Booth
We've been shirking our updating duties here, so we thought it'd be a good time to do some quick housekeeping:
- We recieved a bunch of positive responses to the release of the .vmf source behind our official TF2 maps. As a result, we've decided to go ahead and release the source behind all the player character models, as well as associated animations. We hope this will make it much easier for custom modellers to design new character models, and for machinima makers to have more control over how characters animate in their movies. Look for that SDK update in the next week or so.
- Sticky bombs now get a reduced close range damage ramp up (like Rocket Launcher & Syringe Gun)
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July 15, 2009 - The Soldier
At ease, you worthless sons of mothers!
I've been asked to present our internet blog-reading public with this handsome collection of avatars, which I'm told you can use on Steam. I don't mind telling you I have no idea what any of the words in that last sentence meant. This is the problem with the youth of today: too much time inventing nonsense words, not enough time taking a bullet in the lung defending a hill. I don't have to know what the hell twitters and texting and body sprays are to understand that they're not the sort of thing men should be engaged in. Like conversations, or painting things that aren't a house.
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June 15, 2009 - Dave Riller
Today we're releasing an update to the Source SDK that includes the .vmf source files for many of the official TF2 maps. This is something we've wanted to do for a while, especially as we've been growing the range of game modes in TF. Here's the list of maps that are included in the update: Lumberyard, Ravine, Badlands, Dustbowl, Granary, Gravelpit, 2Fort, Badwater, Goldrush, and Hydro.
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June 8, 2009 - The Soldier
The men at TF2maps.net have devised some sort of box puzzle that they thought you'd enjoy. Let me clear this up right now: They are incorrect in this thinking. I have stared at this blasted thing all morning and I can't make heads or tails of it. This is the problem with today's youth, if you ask me. Spending all their time devising clever boxy word puzzles instead of doing something constructive, like pushups, or jumping on a live grenade, or sitting in a foxhole cradling a man in your arms and watching the blood run out of him and the life drain from his eyes, or sit-ups.
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May 22, 2009 - Erik Johnson
First off, a quick note: We put so much stuff into this update that we didn't manage to cover it all on the internets before the update went live, so we made a special Bonus page. In addition, our merchandising crew had as much fun coming up with Spy & Sniper themed merchandise as we did making the update, so make sure you go and check it all out.
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May 21, 2009 - TF2 Team
...is live. What are you waiting for? Go play!
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May 20, 2009 - Saxton Hale
Oi! You! On the internet! Click this link!
But wait. First, is your boss around? No? Well get him over here! He is going to love this! Your fiancée's parents too. Heck, gather everyone around your computer right now, then read them this prepared statement:
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May 19, 2009 - Stavros Xanthis
Hello to you! My name is Stavros. I am now Vice President of Valve game company! Is very exciting! But much work. I am now head programmer, animator and game designer, plus I am washing Robin's clothes. (So many beef stains!)
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May 18, 2009 - Robin Walker
"Marianne, send in someone please. Anyone at all. Oi! Send in someone with one eyebrow! That'd be marvelous."
"Sir, you've fired everyone."
"Already? But it's not even eight o'clock."
"You've outdone yourself, sir."
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May 18, 2009 - Robin Walker
I think I've found my man. Valve's staff is now down to two employees: me and our Greek intern Stavros Xanthis. We're sitting in the main board room, staring at each other from across the table. I turned up the thermostat as far as it will go. It's hard to make him out behind the waves of heat coming out of the vents, but I think he looks guilty.
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May 18, 2009 - Jay Pinkerton
"Alden, you have three seconds to tell me why you're fired."
"Wait, what? I—"
"You're fired."
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May 18, 2009 - Robin Walker
Valve's head of HR, Kathy, just came to talk to me. I'd been lining up employees in a row against the wall so I could run past and fire them faster.
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May 18, 2009 - Robin Walker
As many of you know, the Meet the Spy video was leaked this weekend. Some of you on the forum have wondered if Valve leaked it on purpose. And until we find the clown who did leak it, the answer to that is yes.
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May 18, 2009 - TF2 Team
You've met the Scout, the Soldier, the Demoman, the Heavy, the Engineer, and the Sniper. Then, for some reason, a sandwich. But now it's time to meet the stealthiest, shiftiest, most secretive, suit-wearing TF team member of all...
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May 15, 2009 - TF2 Team
Day 4 of the Sniper update brings us…uh… hold on, that’s not…
Holy hell. All those conspiracy theorists on the TF forum couldn’t have been right all along, could they? Pyro's going to be inconsolable now.
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May 14, 2009 - TF2 Team
Sniper shows off the latest addition to his arsenal: the Razorback, a beautiful hand-carved tribal shield with a shocking modification.
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May 14, 2009 - Eric Smith
If you haven’t seen it yet, check out the spiffy TF2 video made by AyesDyef over here and check out how spot he really is here. It was his birthday earlier this month, so if you see him on a Goldrush out there, wish him a happy birthday before you shoot him!
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May 13, 2009 - TF2 Team
Day 2 of our Sniper Update is live, this time with a rundown on a new game mode and two new arena maps. Plus a postcard from Sniper, who likes to keep his parents updated on his exciting, legal, not-being-a-crazed-gunman job.
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May 12, 2009 - Robin Walker
No, the Huntsman doesn’t stun. It pins dead/dying players.
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May 12, 2009 - TF2 Team
The Sniper Update is upon us.
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May 5, 2009 - Eric Smith
Also, a quick note: The fine fellows at Gang Garrison have just released version 2.1 on their webpage. We played a bunch of 2.0, and can't wait to spend some time with the new update. There's a ton of new additions, from Control Point mode to Killcams to Manviches, so even if you've played it before, you should head over there and check it out!
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May 5, 2009 - Robin Walker
The Sniper has been a tricky class to update. In particular, designing an alternative to the Sniper Rifle has been a challenge. To understand why, we need to go back, way back, into the mists of time, when dinosaurs roamed the earth, and we started working on TF2. If it helps, you can listen to the Doctor Who Theme while you read.
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April 2, 2009 - Greg Cherlin
April 1, 2009 - Robin Walker
March 12, 2009 - Robin Walker
One of the things we've been thinking about for a while now is how to improve the player experience around finding a server to play on. It's a tricky problem because our master servers need to ask a game server for its details, and that server can lie to us if it wants to. We decided we needed to find a way of scoring servers, with a goal of finding and delisting ones we considered "bad". The scoring system had to penalize lying without penalizing custom game rules, because some players like custom game rules. Best case, the system needed to work entirely from data that didn't come from the servers themselves, so they couldn't lie to us in any way to affect it.
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February 25, 2009 - TF Announcer
Honestly.
Please, do take a cursory glance at the missive directly below this one. Take care to notice its author, and the dismally recent date of its posting.
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February 18, 2009 - TF Announcer
It saddens me that despite my best efforts to instruct and better you, some of you insist on finding new ways to fail.
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February 17, 2009 - Robin Walker
The news you've all been waiting for: The Scout Update!
Also, we released an update yesterday with a change that needs some clarification. The update notes said this:
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February 4, 2009 - Greg Cherlin
On Tuesday we shipped an update that added a bunch of features / bugfixes / balancing tweaks that came out of the community's feedback. In particular, it made some changes to the underlying TF damage system, and as part of that, it modified the way critical hits are determined. We thought it might be interesting to dig a little into the change, and hopefully give you some insight into our thinking.
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January 28, 2009 - Robin Walker
The Scout was one of the first TF2 classes we worked on when we decided to try out a more stylized approach to the game. As a result, his concept art is further afield, and in the eyes of our artists, much more embarrassing. This might be exacerbated by their desire to not have people looking at a piece of their artwork and not liking it, from an artistic point of view. Concept art has a different purpose than that, and so the effort to make it look great is usually unnecessary. In short, there's a special place in hell that all our artists hope we'll go to for showing you their concept art.
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January 27, 2009 - Robin Walker
We're just about done with the Scout pack, and our design and coding has already moved on to the next pack. The weapons and achievements are all nailed down, and we just have to finish up the final artwork on them. We like to do the final art as late as possible to ensure that we don't waste any work, which turned out to be a good decision this time around due to the large number of unlockables we tried out as alternatives to the Scattergun. Balancing his replacement weapon has been very tricky due to large threat difference of the Scout between skilled and non-skilled hands. More on that soon.
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December 10, 2008 - Robin Walker
We've been pretty quiet lately, but thankfully, that's about to end. In the next few days we'll have an update out that has a couple of new features for the Engineer and Spy, and a variety of other smaller fixes.
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October 16, 2008 - Valve Writing Staff
Since the release of Meet the Sandvich in August, several people have asked us how something we'd boasted would be "our magnum opus," "over four hours long" and "make Citizen Kane look like something dumb a complete idiot would make," ended up being one un-dramatic minute spent inside a refrigerator.
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October 8, 2008 - Robin Walker
Work on the next class pack is gearing up, a little slower than we'd like. In the meantime, I thought I'd post some answers to the common email questions we receive.
How do respawn waves work? Is my respawn time affected by my performance? Why do they exist at all?
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September 17, 2008 - Robin Walker
Well, it's been a couple of weeks since we updated the blog, and we thought it was time to let you know why we've been so quiet. The last couple of weeks we've actually been moonlighting on Left 4 Dead. While the L4D team has been focusing on finishing up the core cooperative gameplay, we've been helping them by working on their Versus mode. Versus is the recently-announced competitive mode where one team plays the Survivors and one team plays the Infected. We've learned a lot while working on TF2 in the last year, and we were able to apply some of those lessons to Versus mode. As a result, we've just finished adding critical hits, respawn waves, flawless auto-team balancing, and facestabs to L4D, while removing anything that looked remotely like a grenade. I kid, I kid.
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August 28, 2008 - Dhabih Eng
The path to arriving at a final design for a character is sometimes a long and winding one. This was especially the case for the Demoman and we thought it would be interesting to step through that process and shed a little light on how we arrive at our final designs. Early on in the process, soon after we decided that we were going to start a new, more stylized direction for TF2 it opened up a whole range of possibilities in terms of what that meant visually. One of the first (albeit short-lived) ideas that was being thrown around was to try to recreate a look of claymation for our game. The idea was to make the world look like a miniature set built for clay figures which animated and gibbed into chunks of clay.
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August 19, 2008 - Dhabih Eng
We decided to create a new TF environment after sensing some desert-fatigue, both internally and externally. The new theme had to be a departure from the current look without being so different that the characters felt out of place in it. We also wanted to leverage some content from our existing environments, since crafting every asset from scratch would mean we'd be moving the release beyond Valve time and into the realm of geologic time.
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August 11, 2008 - Robin Walker
We've been a little quiet for the last week as we've put the finishing touches on the Heavy update. We thought the Pyro pack was the biggest we'd be doing for a while, due to the large changes to the Pyro, but the Heavy update has turned out to be even bigger. In addition to the three unlockable weapons and thirty-five achievements for the Heavy, we've got a new game mode with five new arenas for it, a new Payload map focusing on more open spaces than Goldrush, and another popular community-made map. Throughout the rest of the week we'll be giving you the details on all this, and if all goes well, you'll have your hands on it shortly afterwards.
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August 1, 2008 - Jakob Jungels
One of the things we're looking at for the next update is the creation of a new type of environment for our levels to be built in. We're pretty happy with the way our environments have turned out so far, but as we create more and more maps with these achievement packs, we want our level designers to have more to work with in terms of giving their settings a unique look.
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July 24, 2008 - Jakob Jungels
For this week's update, we've got another set of trading card images to take a look at. The focus of our most recent achievement update, the Pyro is a character that players may have seeing a lot of lately - making life a nightmare inferno for both the Spy and Medic.
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July 16, 2008 - Eric Smith
One of the things we hope to do on this blog is to point out the creative things that members of the TF2 community are up to. The Steampowered TF2 forum members have been collecting links ever since TF2 was released, and you can take a look at the list (and its accompanying 46-pages-so-far (!) forum thread)here.
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July 9, 2008 - Robin Walker
Well, we were expecting some response to A Heavy Problem, but we severely underestimated just how much interest everyone had in contributing. If you're one of the many folks who emailed us proposals and haven't received a response, please accept our apologies, because there's just too many for us to reply to all of them. From the large amount of feedback and forum activity, it's clear that many of you found this interesting, so we'll definitely be posting more design goals. For those of you still thinking about it, here are some more tools to use in evaluating ideas:
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July 3, 2008 - Jakob Jungels
To continue from the previous week, today we have some additional finished trading card images for you to take a look at - the Heavy and the Medic.
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July 1, 2008 - Robin Walker
As Gabe mentioned in his lengthy response to an email recently, the next class pack will focus on the Heavy. For the Medic and Pyro packs we kept our goals for the pack pretty close to our chest, but for the Heavy we've decided to open up the process a little.
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June 27, 2008 - Jakob Jungels
During the development process with most of our games, we end up creating content that, for a variety of reasons, may never see the light of day. Sometimes we may not have the time to bring the content to finish, sometimes we use them as a company-only experiment, and sometimes the content just isn't in line with what we're doing at the time. Needless to say, there's a fair bit of cool stuff that we've never been able to share with our fans. We're happy to say that this blog has now given us a unique format in which to share some of the unused artwork with you.
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June 24, 2008 - Robin Walker
In any game there's often a bunch of hidden complexity behind some of the simplest looking features, and TF2 is no exception. One example is that of the Medic's medigun. From a player perspective, it appears simple enough: point it at a team mate, press the button, and it'll heal them. After playing with a bit, most players notice that they have to stay near their target and maintain line-of-sight to their target. After playing with it a lot, some players notice that there's some variability in the rate at which they heal their targets. I thought it might be interesting for Medics to explain what's going on here, and why.
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June 18, 2008 - Eric Kirchmer
When producing concept art, our artists believe in providing a variety of options for any given subject. A single concept rendering would place too strict a constraint on the resulting game design.
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June 18, 2008 - Robin Walker
Now that we've settled into regular releases of content, we've found ourselves wanting a better way to talk directly to the TF2 community about the state of the game and some of the reasoning behind the choices we're making. Our hope is that this blog will accomplish that, and give everyone some better insight into our development process as well.
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