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

CSRD Update: 31 December 2021

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It's November! That means all your festive stuff needs to not be out yet; calm down, you pesky neighbors.

In TF2 news: Scream Fortress XII is live! Was live! Has been live! By the time this update page is out, it's probably over.

In case it's unclear though, these update pages are a summary of what's happened since the last one; the actual changes happen whenever.

Welp, time to dust off this update post originally dated 07 November 2020 that's been sitting in draft mode and hit that publish button. Thought I'd let the year pass without a blag post for 2021, huh?

It's been a long past two years.

ah, yes. map updates

In 2020:

  • Added the four new maps from the Scream Fortress XII update: Megalo (KOTH), Bloodwater (Payload, Badwater Basin), Hassle Castle (Payload, Upward), and Moldergrove (KOTH, Undergrove).
    • Congratulations to the map authors!
    • Promoted Megalo and Moldergrove to their officially released versions (removing the Workshop variants).
    • These, like all Halloween maps on the server, will only be running during Halloween and within the 24-hour span of a real-life full moon.
  • The following navigation meshes were tweaked:
    • Bloodwater: The initial spawn door is now blocked after second point capture.
    • Hassle Castle: Various changes, including removing the killzone areas and fixing up connectivity on a number of ramps.

In 2021:

  • Added new maps with bot support:
    • Koreto (KOTH)
  • Restored bot support for the following maps:
    • Shark Bay (KOTH) (b13 → rc1)
    • Mist (5CP) (rc1d → rc1e)
    • Fulgur (A/D CP) (rc2 → rc2a)
    • Villa (5CP) (b15a → b17a)
    • hsurdloG (Payload)
  • Added the six new maps from Scream Fortress XIII to the server's Halloween rotation.
  • Added the six new maps from Smissmas 2021 to the server's winter rotation.

Gameplay / client tweaks

In 2020:

  • Fixed spies having issues with copying stock multiclass weapons. This server probably isn't massively affected by the issue since bots get their own loadout, but the fix is there regardless.
    • Truly a first-world problem trying to impersonate the poor and weaponless.

In 2021:

Bot support changes

In 2020:

After a few days of pain and suffering at the tail end of October:

  • Moved to an in-house version of class restrictions for bots. I was using Class Restrictions for Bots, but I've had a number of extremely rare cases where it would continuously respawn and exhaust the entity limit.
  • The bot code was finally fixed to encourage aggressive pushing on capture point / payload maps again (a feature that is present in the default TFBots). This was originally stubbed out to make the bots work properly on Arena.

Backend tweaks

In 2020:

  • Push-based caching was added to the front page scoreboard view.
    • At the end of a map, the game will push updated scoreboard data to the web backend, which will then store it temporarily. This means fewer instances of opening the front page to "server is changing map" messages.

In 2021:

  • Migrated off of SteamTools in favor of SteamWorks.
  • Add vtable dumping support as part of Automated Data Dumper.
(Up you go!)