The blog for the bleeding-edge news in the server of Research and Development.

CSRD Update: 16 March 2016

Wed 16 March 2016

← Blog

Hey! Working on migrating a lot of this web content to a static site. Should be pretty nice and clean once it's all said and done.

Anyways, with that, I'd hope to get a proper blogging setup running. While I'll still be doing short-form changelogs as text snippets, it's merely one way to post messages. I'll start doing some more extensive lists of changes as part of this blag.

The details of the most recent changes can be found below:

Client features:

  • Intelligent intel notifications! Opt-in via /settings to get a more detailed message of how long the intel is allowed to remain idle before respawning. Also provides a handy countdown timer.
  • Building Hitsounds is officially in-game as of last month. The server implementation has been removed.

Updated bots:

  • Bots are now robots! Bots (and only bots) are reskinned as robots from Mann vs. Machine. Attempting to use the Be The Robot commands will provide a friendly failure message.
  • Bot Weapon Randomizer is back! Rewritten from the ground-up, this in-house plugin uses the TF2 Items DB library to generate a unique loadout for each bot, each map. A few updates to the setup means they can now use all-class reskins and shotguns.

Improvements to SourceTiVo, our resident watchman:

  • Pretty bare as of now, but players can now see spectators that are joining SourceTV.
  • Players that sit in the MOTD screen for too long (i.e., hasn't even joined the Spectators team) will automatically be moved to the SourceTV relay. If that fails for some reason, such as on players that join through QuickPlay, they will be kicked.

A bunch of internal tweaks:

  • Switched to my personal Yet Another Map Config Plugin for map configurations. It has more definite support for Workshop maps.
  • Secret live scoreboard improvements. They're not front-facing yet.
  • The site is migrating off of PHP in favor of static site generation for even MORE SPEED. Plus, the error messages should be a little less terrible. Javascript redirects. Gross.
  • Added more swap space. For some reason, it seems like SourceTV is leaking. It's pretty bad, but what can we do. Only decent option at the moment is to bring down the server after a long enough period of uptime.

Hope you enjoy the changes! As always, feel free to leave feedback in our humble little Steam group.

(Up you go!)