Team Fortress 2 Classic News

[p]Happy August 32nd! This month, project funds were embezzled to take a vacation to Chicago, wasting time during our most crucial phase of development. Gratefully, we're still on schedule, and the developers in question have been put to death.[/p]
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[h2]State of the Game[/h2]
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[p]For a lot of developers, August was a return to college, or their time to go on holiday, so raw throughput went down. Volunteer projects are always at the whim of how much time people have left over after they're done with their real lives, but we're happy with how much we accomplished regardless.

Most features are now in and usable. We're working with community server hosts to help them migrate, and the first Engineer Fortress playtest was a roaring success. Beyond launching with all of our major content, we also want to make sure that your favorite community servers are still available.

Just keep in mind that the outward progress is going to appear to slow down as we inch closer to release. The smallest details and fixes can take the most time, and we try to show what's interesting instead of what works as expected.

We're not ready to share details yet, but an interesting opportunity has come up that may force September to have a lot more to show, stay tuned![/p]
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[h2]Magnum Opus[/h2]
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[p]Our in-house orchestra (one-man band) is back with a new track to bless your ears, an expanded version of the theme from Meet the Sniper.[/p]
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[p]We'll be shipping a longer, full-quality version alongside the release of the game later this year.[/p]
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[h2]Hearing without listening[/h2]
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[p]We're also excited to show off the set of sounds we've been prototyping for the Damage Feedback system we mentioned last month. Our goal for this system is to help players navigate combat by giving them more information on the type of damage they're dealing or receiving.

As such, we're designing these to feel more subtle and intuitive compared to hitsounds, and these are still being adjusted in response to playtester feedback and inevitably now, your feedback. Get commenting.[/p]
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[h2]Refrigerated[/h2]
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[p]We've revisited one of our original multi-team maps, Frigid, to touch it up in advance of the Steam release. This includes designing original, custom soundscapes and giving a few areas a small makeover. These changes are meant to help the map feel more consistent and believable to players.[/p]
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[h2]Acute Angles[/h2]
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[p]SVG support for crosshairs was another item we mentioned in passing last month. While finished in code, we were still figuring out how we wanted to execute the visuals.

We're happy to say that this has now expanded to killfeed icons! To all players rich and privileged enough to own a 4K monitor: the answer to your struggles now has a clear and worshipable visage.[/p]

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[h2]School Picture Day[/h2]
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[p]Right now, if you Google "sniper tf2" and look at the second image, he is green. Our old class renders have gone further than anyone could've imagined. They've been used to represent TF2's classes on thousands of posts and videos all around the internet. It is humiliating.[/p][p]We've wanted to revisit these for a while to address some persistent testimonials from our players, such as "Scout looks like a chipmunk" and "Why is Scout like that" or even "Please fix that creepy Scout portrait". [/p][p]As such, we've been taking the time to redo all of our class portraits from the ground up, painting over them to help them feel like true portraits instead of mere 3D renders.[/p]

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[h2]What else?[/h2]
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[p]In between moments spent ducking under beds and couches, hiding from the aural assault of the Chicago Air & Water Show, our developers have also squeezed these changes out:[/p]

• Reimplemented the Shock Therapy
• Reimplemented team-exclusive healthkits dropping upon killing enemies in Arena mode
• Bots have gone through the necessary re-education to play VIP gamemodes without immediately throwing the round (be nice to them, they're new to this)
• Overhauled the medal system for testers, contributors, and developers
• Countless improvements and fixes to the LUX shaders
• Implemented Global Team skins for character models, ensuring they show up as intended on 3D HUD elements (& other potential uses in the far future)
• Spent multiple slow and agonizing days of developer time on investigating and miraculously fixing a one-line oversight in our FGD files that caused all map instances to be mysteriously misplaced and/or unable to compile properly, driving our level designers to threaten acts that we agreed should never be put to print
• Many smaller fixes, cleanups, incremental work on larger features, and minor polish passes

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[p]We really are sorry for the late post this month, but we hope what we have in the pipeline makes up for it soon. Thanks!

~ Sniffy, with loving help and feedback from Azzy, Nito, Waugh, Boba, abp, and Ultr4nima[/p]

[p]We're back for our monthly report, and right on time. This month has easily been the most productive month since we started this port back in February. Lots of new talent has joined EMINOMA, and we've seen the project come together faster than we ever could've hoped for.[/p]
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[h2]Too many colors for a shade of gray[/h2]
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[p]Support for additional teams, one of our hallmark features, has been completely reimplemented and vastly expanded.

Previously, for level designers, enabling four-team in a map was just a single toggle. For our Steam release, we have expanded the team system to be completely modular.

Mappers can now pit any combination of teams against each other, and teams can also be activated and deactivated during an ongoing round. For instance, you could have three-team maps, GRN vs. YLW maps, or maps that have an actual failure condition for teams, causing them to be eliminated and deactivated.

This was spearheaded by the creator of the Mapbase project, Blixibon, who was initially recruited to advise us through the porting process back in February, and was recently promoted to full-time collaborator. This Herculean effort was completed in just a few weeks, and we aim to upstream it back to Mapbase for other projects to take advantage of.[/p]
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[h2]Throwing a bone to artists[/h2]
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[p]Speaking of Mapbase, it has been completely re-integrated and updated for the TF2 SDK, including its modified shaders.

This allows us to retain TF2 Classic's distinctive look by using full Lambertian shading ("beta shading") on player materials, as opposed to the Half-Lambert technique used in retail Team Fortress 2, in addition to many other essential features and staples of our maps, such as parallax-corrected cubemaps.

This isn't the end of our shader improvements! We're also working closely with ShiroDkxrto2, head of the LUX project, aiming to completely rewrite and improve Source Engine shaders.

As a result, we will be introducing more advanced features such as Phong shading for brushes and displacements from static light sources, or lightmapped water with support for flowmaps, but we'll go into more detail on that in a future progress report.[/p]
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[p]In retaining our visual improvements, we've also had to take a closer look at our mapping tools. Previously, we recommended that our mappers use third-party compilers that provided more advanced features from newer Source Engine games-- but we have had a need for clean, first-party implementations of these features.

For Steam, our recommended map compilers can now be improved by us directly, and we've extensively fixed issues and expanded the tools available to level designers. Currently, we have the following (optional!) features:[/p]
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• An original Ambient Occlusion implementation!
• Support for multiple sources of light from the skybox with light_directional
• A softened cosine term for smoother light blending
• Shadows cast from translucent brushes and displacements
• Chopping texture lights for convincing area lights that cast softer shadows
• More accurate displacement lighting
• Several other improvements and optimizations

[p]...and many more.[/p]
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[h2]More love for our models[/h2]
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[p]While our programmers have been hard at work bringing everything to the Steam release, some of our artists have been chipping away at pet projects, touch-ups, and newly-added details.

We've implemented proper neck stumps for decapitated enemies, a feature that was previously planned for the Harvester's release but was cut for time. Gross![/p]
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[p]Wrinklemaps have been added to player faces, allowing them to be even more expressive. Ease the pain of dying because they had a silly face while killing you! Have another reason to raise your model quality![/p]
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[p]We've also remade a handful of props from other Valve games for mappers to use, to better fit the style of the game.[/p]
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[h2]Is ASMR classic?[/h2]
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[p]Audio has seen a special focus this month! For the average player, the most significant advancement here is our upcoming Damage Feedback system.

This is a new system that allows for custom sounds to play from a range of different incoming and outgoing damage events. This includes generic and lethal damage, like the existing hitsound and killsound system, but also customized sounds for:[/p]

• Headshots
• Burning
• Bleeding
• Direct hits from rockets and grenades
• Blocked damage to invulnerable targets
• Reduced damage to targets with resistances
• Damaging an Engineer building

[p]...and any weapon-specific override you could want.

As we've already implemented feedback sounds for the Nailgun and Syringe Gun previously, we're using this to expand support to the rest of our weapon roster. This can be used alongside your existing hitsound and killsound, so you can get more information while still reliving your Quake 3 halcyon days.

Making our own sounds for these is still in-progress, and we'll cover what that sounds like and what our goals are in a future progress report, but extensibility for modders is a major focus (both for server hosts implementing custom weapons, and regular modders that want something better than hitsounds to work with).[/p]
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[h2]The kitchen sink[/h2]
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[p]Is that not enough? Are you still hungry? Still begging for more progress? A quickfire list of everything that wasn't big enough to get its own spotlight? A progress report on the state of reconstruction after your house was burnt down for the insurance payout? We could never let you down.[/p]

• Massive bug fix passes on Scout, Soldier, Pyro, Demoman, and Sniper
• 10 more achievements ported and integrated with Steam
• The Domination gamemode has been reimplemented
• Stuck looping sounds have been (mostly) fixed, after 17 years
• Backported Left 4 Dead's lag compensation system, and soundscape additions
• Fixed and unhid `sv_soundemitter_flush` for modders to flush soundscripts without a game restart
• SVG support for HUD elements (crosshairs are no longer blurry!)
• Spy can, once again, fake-reload while disguised
• The global "gray team" disguise for Four-Team is back, and a little more intuitive
• Material proxies, ported from Reactive Drop, that can be used to localize textures based on the player's language, or change them based on the player's date and time

[p]The game is shaping up, and in our playtests, it really feels like TF2 Classic now. Our last major hurdle is our various game menus, which are going to be more than a simple port of what you've already seen.[

Once that's finalized, we will enter a period of pure QA and bug hunting until release, and as always, we will keep you posted on the progress of both.

~ Sniffy, with loving help and feedback from Azzy, Boba, Sam, Blixibon, and Nito[/p]

[p]Hello everyone! It's time once again for what we hope to be a monthly status report on the progress of the Steam release - and we are characteristically one week late. Except this time, it's for a very good reason. Today, July 4th, 2025, marks the 5th anniversary of our mod's 2.0.0 launch with the Death & Taxes update!

It's been a long ride, and it's only up from here. I'd like to thank not only all the devs working on the port, but also all the game designers and artists who've come before us. They've paved the path as much as we have trailed it.

Since our last update in May:[/p]
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• Beta testing is in full swing, and the first full matches of the port are being played. With this comes a wave of bug reports, unexpected issues, missing details, and the occasional (common) crash.. we're digging through our growing backlog to address these.
• Networking, dedicated server support, automatic crash reporting, and reintegration of key features are a major focus. These are core systems that need to be nailed down before we can ensure the game feels just right. It's not as flashy as ported content, but this work ensures the mod has a solid foundation so we can reach the quality our players are expecting.
• The "Lucksman" is officially gone.

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[p]Huntsman arrows will no longer snap to the nearest hitbox to trigger a headshot. Instead, on hitting the bounding box, the arrow sends out 9 directional checks (like a shotgun blast). Its straight forward and consistent: if the head is close enough, it's a headshot. If not, it's a miss. Here is an early demonstration, remember everything is subject to change as we continue to test and iterate.[/p]
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[p]A similar rework is also coming to the Anti-Aircraft Cannon, and other weapons will get quality of life changes as well.

Finally, we are proud to announce that we have reached 200,000 wishlists on Steam!

This is more people than we could have dreamt of. We still have a long road ahead. UI and Four-Team HUD remain major hurdles, a long backlog of QOL features and small details still needs attention, but we're committed to monthly updates from here on out - with teasers, progress reports, and milestone highlights all leading up to launch.

You've all been with us through thick and thin, it's the least we can do to keep you in the loop. Happy 4th of July!

~ Nito[/p]

[p]Hello! We have been fairly silent for the past three months and wanted to give you all an update on where we're at, and the status of the project as a whole. We have been very busy porting the game to the new SDK and haven't had much time to reach out to the wider community who play our game day-to-day. So, here's the run-down of what's going on:

When we began the process of porting TF2C to the SDK, we quickly realized it would be a massive undertaking. We are trying to take our copy of TF2 with its 10 years of changes, and merge it into Valve's copy of TF2 with its 15 years of changes. If we simply copy and paste our code into Valve's code, things break. Lots of features depend on missing functions, or are incompatible with code Valve rewrote. In short, we are effectively remaking everything from the ground up, which takes a lot of time and testing.

We had also been dealing with manpower issues for this colossal task. While our website lists a lot of programmers, this is somewhat misleading; we do not kick out developers for being inactive. While it looks like we have over a dozen programmers, the total we had available for the port was… 3. We since have massively increased that count to about 8 which allows us to give this remake the care it deserves.

As of right now, our internal build is in a somewhat functional state. VIP and Four-Team are mostly working, 18 of our 22 original weapons exist in some form, the item schema works properly for custom weapons support, and many lighting and visual improvements are trickling in. This may sound close to complete, but most of the game is missing visual flair and QA passes, and there is still a long way to go. However, we have reached a state where we can resume internal beta testing, and the beta is being set up as we speak.

We deeply appreciate the patience the community has with us, and we hope to be more interactive with the community in the future. Part of that is getting a better sense of what you want out of this project, and what is most effective at rekindling that feeling of early TF2. To help with that, we are hoping to send out many more surveys in the future, not just for what works in gameplay terms, but for what strikes that core experience we're trying to evoke. The first of these, a survey on which of our weapons feel the most "classic" to you, will be available on our Discord next week.

~ Nito[/p]

[p]"Steam" is a mysterious resource created when coal is burned in certain situations — a harrowing thought to coal-lovers like the Civilian, to whom burning coal is like setting one's own children on fire. But maybe a foray into the Steam industry is just what the company needs to capture new eyes.

While porting efforts are underway, you can wishlist the game right now![/p]
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