official Team Fortress 2

[Denis W. Veteran]

Those are my two most wanted hats, and even a few months of idling didn't get them for me.

When trading comes in effect, I'll trade a ushanka for the toque or a pyro hat (brigade helmet if possible). :)

Platform(s): Windows, Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, Mac OS X :whistle:

Correction: just Windows and Mac OS X. The Xbox 360 version is almost a near abortion, and let's pretend the Playstation 3 version never existed.

[Nagisan]

http://www.teamfortress.com/119/comingsoon.html

Just watched it myself. Pretty epic!

His new melee weapon is definitely going to be a mallet of some sort (it looks rubber, but that wouldn't be as effective at causing damage as a metal mallet......perhaps thats a downside to it though?).

Didn't see any building reveals. Theres a schematic behind him that seems to show a robotic arm, but thats about it.....theres also a L3 and L1 sentry, but nothing other than those really seem to stick out.....theres a few other designs on the blueprint with the robotic arm, but they are difficult to see and are likely just different angles of the robotic arm.

EDIT: That, or a blowtorch unlock as a melee weapon. Perhaps a constant damage supply and afterburn with the blowtorch, but slower building time (maybe a constant repair/upgrade instead of repairing/upgrading once per swing?)? Then the mallet can possibly repair and/or upgrade faster than the normal wrench, which higher crits but less raw damage or something?

[Denis W. Veteran]

Oh crap, new shiny item for people who bought the game during its beta testing stage.

That also means that people who bought the game before January 10, 2008 now get the Grizzled veteran, including me. :D

(likewise, Soldier fortune is now January 10, 2008 - October 9, 2008, and Mercenary October 10, 2008 - present)

[Minifig]

[Minifig]

Oh crap, new shiny item for people who bought the game during its beta testing stage.

That also means that people who bought the game before January 10, 2008 now get the Grizzled veteran, including me. :D

And.. I'm a DAMN happy camper:

[Nagisan]

<snip>

Just Valve playing mind games with us most likely. I highly doubt the engineer will get any sort of robotic device......but it is possible he will get a blowtorch and/or a mallet, as he does use both in the video.

[The_Decryptor Veteran]

http://www.teamfortress.com/119/comingsoon.html

Wooo

When trading comes in effect, I'll trade a ushanka for the toque or a pyro hat (brigade helmet if possible). :)

...

Ehhh, but then I'd have no Pyro hat!

I could say goodbye to the Toque though.

Oh crap, new shiny item for people who bought the game during its beta testing stage.

That also means that people who bought the game before January 10, 2008 now get the Grizzled veteran, including me. :D

(likewise, Soldier fortune is now January 10, 2008 - October 9, 2008, and Mercenary October 10, 2008 - present)

Ha, I said us "beta testers" should get a platinum medal!

Edit: Mine has a different date on it :/ I apparently bought it a day later than I did when it was gold.

[Denis W. Veteran]

Hah, just noticed: if you look carefully in the video, the first place Propaganda poster (Give 'em the boot right in the fruit!) is on the wall. :p

[lalalawawawa]

Mmmm... come on Valve! :D

I love playing as an engineer while defending. Some update for the class would be most welcome. :)

[Nagisan]

Hah, just noticed: if you look carefully in the video, the first place Propaganda poster (Give 'em the boot right in the fruit!) is on the wall. :p

Yup, along with a metal heavy head on the table in front of the engy. Easiest to see when its panning towards the engy and the torch lights everything up. There also seem to be 2 robotic-like heads in the background behind the engy on the right side, with red lights as eyes. Maybe the robotic arm and obvious robotic parts (heavy head, and the two misc heads) is a hint that bots will be fully incorporated and working along with the engy update? Not a huge feature I will enjoy, but still a neat one none-the-less...

[Minifig]

By the time trading comes out, everyone will have everything already.

[lalalawawawa]

I've just played a few hours of TF2 after a few weeks break. Wow, the game feels much, much smoother and faster with all these new updates. (Y)

[Nagisan]

I've just played a few hours of TF2 after a few weeks break. Wow, the game feels much, much smoother and faster with all these new updates. (Y)

Really? Most people who notice any performance change notice a negative change. I personally have no problems running the game on high, but performance has definitely not increased since I started playing...

[Denis W. Veteran]

I just got two display driver crashes in a row while playing. :ermm: Could be game related, but I haven't updated my drivers in a while, so eh.

[John Freeman]

Really? Most people who notice any performance change notice a negative change. I personally have no problems running the game on high, but performance has definitely not increased since I started playing...

Oh, it has, it definitely has. Dunno when you started playing but biggest leap in performance came with introduction of multicore rendering.

[Nagisan]

Oh, it has, it definitely has. Dunno when you started playing but biggest leap in performance came with introduction of multicore rendering.

Started playing right at the scout update. Yes I admit multicore rendering did help performance, but it also introduced crashes on some systems during map change. I went through and removed everything out of my custom configs (basically running the default TF2 configs), and reset my settings and the main config file, and I still get map load crashes every couple map changes with multicore rendering enabled.

But, even with multicore rendering enabled, performance now is lower than performance when multicore rendering was released. The extra stability issues it can add are not worth the minor performance increases (I get playable FPS on all high with multicore rendering off....minimum 50-55 at all times and what not, when I turn it on I get even higher performance, with dips that are not as low as with it off, down to like 60-65, but I crash every few map changes) unless you take the time to try out the settings to ensure you do not crash every few map changes.

[Denis W. Veteran]

This happened last night (or the night before). Some scout lagged out in front of my sentry WHILE he used bonk. The result?

[The_Decryptor Veteran]

I have picked up a performance issue lately, I would drop down to 5fps or so every couple of seconds. Using "+showbudget" it showed there was a lot of time spent in "Swap Buffers" (that's slow), I tried re-enabling multi-core rendering and it went away (I disabled it because I crash on map change).

Problem is, with multi-core rendering enabled the time spent changes to "Mat_ThreadedEndFrame", and I never get an FPS above 30 (used to get 60 easily), but at least it's a consistent 30 and doesn't dip down.

[Nagisan]

I have picked up a performance issue lately, I would drop down to 5fps or so every couple of seconds. Using "+showbudget" it showed there was a lot of time spent in "Swap Buffers" (that's slow), I tried re-enabling multi-core rendering and it went away (I disabled it because I crash on map change).

Problem is, with multi-core rendering enabled the time spent changes to "Mat_ThreadedEndFrame", and I never get an FPS above 30 (used to get 60 easily), but at least it's a consistent 30 and doesn't dip down.

Interesting, never knew of +showbudget until now :p

With multicore rendering disabled, I get about 80 FPS in a room full of 16 bots, with the most time spent with "Other Model Rendering", which makes sense....with multicore rendering I get around 120-135 FPS in the same room with the most time being spent in "Mat_ThreadedEndFrame", similar to you.

Oddly enough, the second slowest thing in terms of time taken to render is the VGUI........anybody know why this would be? I mean, I understand the GUI should be refresh fairly often to properly show your health and ammo count, but why does it take 2ms (which spikes whenever you fire or take damage as the values change) to render the VGUI itself.

After checking it seems the VGUI is basically all 2D in the game.....that means not only your HUD, but any flat 2D objects you see on the screen as well (if I understand it correctly) which would be things like the screens and monitors in the 3D game world itself. I am also assuming particles may be a part of that due to how much higher it spikes whenever any type of action is going on.

Also, when lots of action is on screen, Displacement Rendering also seems to take quite a while compared to other stuff...

Very interesting that +showbudget......surprising to see a majority of time spent rendering frames when little action is going on (with multicore rendering enabled and players are simply running around and not firing) is actually spent on rendering 2D objects.....

[The_Decryptor Veteran]

Yeah, I get the VGUI spikes as well. VGUI should only be the HUD or in-game windows (options, server browser, etc.). You can render VGUI objects in the world though (e.g. HL2:EP2, the radar in the jalopy was a VGUI object), but I haven't heard of TF2 using that ability.

Adding bots makes the graphs go wild for me, only a few lines don't get spikes.

[Blackhearted]

I hope in the engi update they finally do away with being able to choose your team. Cause they NEED to do something about the blatant team stacking that has plagued this games entire life.

[Minifig]

I hope in the engi update they finally do away with being able to choose your team. Cause they NEED to do something about the blatant team stacking that has plagued this games entire life.

Play on auto-balance servers.

[Blackhearted]

Last i checked, autobalance effects team numbers when 1 side has +2 or more than the other, not the thing where all the actually GOOD players intentionally join one team and steamroll the whole map in 2 minutes

[Denis W. Veteran]

Some servers don't autobalance during the round depending on the conditions, which is pretty annoying. It becomes 14 versus 5 because more than half your team rage quit, yet because your team had more points (before the team scramble) it refuses to autobalance... and the inevitable steamroll kicks in :rolleyes:

[The_Decryptor Veteran]

I think I may have a more fundamental problem, I started Portal and I was getting 12fps while rendering the menu screen.

All the menu screen is, is an room with a few props in it. And it was struggling to render it.

Edit: And most of the time was spent in Swap Buffers, seeing the time to render per frame, every time swap buffers spiked the time shot up to 100ms per frame, for a total of 10fps.