πŸ‘…
πŸ‘‡

Latest News

Upcoming changes that may affect server hosts

October 27, 2022 - sniffy194
Tags:
announcement
development
Hi all,

We've been hard at work on the next major update, 2.1.0, and are inching closer to a full release. In the meantime, we've opted to release a smaller patch, 2.0.4, that backports a large number of bug and exploit fixes from 2.1.0. These vary in size, and we'll publish a full changelog in a few days when the update is released, but we wanted to give a heads up for server owners who may be affected.

In this release, we plan to purge item schemas and other loose text files whenever a client disconnects from a server. While this resolves the issue of servers, intentionally and unintentionally, poisoning clients with broken schemas, it also makes life easier for anyone that wants to host a server with custom weapons.

Previously, to avoid accidental poisoning, you would have to go out of your way to rename map files and repack the contained cubemaps. Now, you can trust that whatever you send to your clients will only affect your clients. This means that once 2.0.4 is released, you can run unmodified maps on your server, and ship item schemas for them as-isβ€”"pl_upward_items_game.txt" is no longer an occupational hazard.

Though existing setups will not break yet, we highly recommend migrating to serving your weapon assets and schemas separately from your maps in order to respect the bandwidth of your players. Packing item schemas directly into modified map files is considered deprecated, and will likely break in 2.1.0.

Separately, we also maintain our own official builds of the tools and binaries for SourceMod usage. Assuming that you use SourceMod on your server, we recommend upgrading. You can, and should, already do this on your 2.0.3 server, see here: https://github.com/tf2classic/SM-TF2Classic-Tools

We also have a server verification system now. Message us on our Discord to request approval, and you'll be given access to the #server-hosting channel on our Discord for special help and support, along with having your server and its live playercount listed on our website: https://tf2classic.org/serverlist/

That's all for now. See you soon when we officially release 2.0.4!