TF2

My week of me time begins

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I’m officially on vacation now. The weather was nice, and for my first day of vacation I decided to clean the bedding and take it easy. I even played a bit on the couch today, and even got back to my old roots in TF2. I even got enough junk to craft this butt pirate hat!

I have to say that TF2 has aged considerably well over the years. Hard to believe that it’s over a decade old, though the deliberately cartoony graphics make it timeless.

I also had a nice quiet Halloween. People at work liked my costume, quite a few were baffled by it at the same time. What baffled me though were people telling me my costume was “cute”. I fail to see what is cute about me wearing a metal jaw with a sombrero and poncho. :rick:

As for the rest of the week I haven’t really planned anything special. I just wanted to get away into my own world for awhile. Probably tackle some errands tomorrow, then do something evil. :zorak:

TF2 doesn’t like Open Source Drivers

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I ran into a bit of a problem running TF2 under Linux; I’ll be in the middle of a game and it’ll spit this engine error:

Out of memory or address space. Texture quality setting may be too high.

Doing a little research gave me an answer, but not one I like. Apparently this bug has been around since an update last year and seems to mostly be noticeable under Mac and Linux, especially if you’re running Open Source drivers (or if you’re trying to run the game on a potato). One “temp” solution is to delete the sound.cache file before launching the game. I say “temp” in quotes because it’s 2018 and this still seems to be an issue.

So it looks like my options are delete sound.cache every time I want to play, or play under Windows… which I planned to go both ways on anyway, but now it seems the Windows version will take precedence. I know I could play it via Wine if I wanted to, but considering I have this setup as a dualboot that seems rather pointless if I already have a native client…

Well, it is my weekend. I had plans to head back to Windows anyway at some point. I haven’t been there since Monday. 😛

Valve, you’ve gone too far.

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Some of you might remember awhile back when I wrote about the pro’s and con’s of Steam, where I pointed out the good and bad with their recent choices. Probably one of the biggest points I touched on was the Steam Mobile Authenticator. I went into detail about how dependent Steam is on having your account tethered to a cell phone at the client level. But what about people who run dedicated servers for TF2, CS:GO, etc? I’m one of those people, and you want to know what the status is? Fucking stupid.

Last year I had to close down my CS:GO server when I discovered that I had to have a phone number attached to my account in order for it to function in anything but LAN mode. I decided to say screw it since it was the least popular server that I ran. Today however I noticed that for whatever reason my MvM Quickplay server was running insecure despite being set otherwise. Upon doing some research I discovered that a phone number must be associated with the Steam account the server is running off of. Oh, it’ll run. But in insecure mode, great huh? I feel like I’m being blackmailed… Either give us your phone number or your quickplay servers will never be secure again.

Fuck you Valve, and fuck the lowest common denominator for being stupid enough to get scammed, and practically forcing server owners like me to suffer the consequences of their stupid fucking actions. What the hell is the point of having a phone number tied to a server? I can at least kind of sort of see the point in clients having a phone number tied to their account for security reasons and VAC banning users who hack on an alt account tied to the same phone number, but why servers?!?!?!?!

The server software Valve provides for their Source Dedicated Servers is free, creating Steam accounts is free. It doesn’t take much to make an alt account with a cheap cellphone and a small game purchase on your account. So what fucking point are they trying to make?

Now I’m in a position where I’m contemplating if it’ll be worth it to get a cheap android to prevent this from happening to my other servers, or if I should just shut down when their time eventually comes. My MvM server was one of the more popular TF2 servers in my collection and I hate seeing it go because of Valve wanting a fucking cell number. If I do get an android though I’ll only use it for my alt server account. I’ll remove the battery and shove it in the drawer when I’m done. I fucking hate this.

Gaming Open Thread

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It almost always seems to be shitty weather whenever I happen to get a day off from work. Good thing I have a large gaming arsenal to take on the stormy weather!

I made some outfits in Gmod today. Nothing too spectacular, mainly just placing hats on my playermodel and a nice sixpack.

sixpack

😛 Then I did a little bit of ESO for awhile and finished the Castle Rilis quest, where you escort a Rilis family member in finding their family helm. As expected I ended up having to kill him after the fact… Oh well, at least I completed one quest.

Then we did some Gmod Cinema for awhile, catching up on some funny videos. We did have a couple other users on the server, one tried to obstruct my brothers view of the movie screen by sitting on his head. This was remedied by turning the asshat invisible. 😛

We then ventured off to the main sandbox, which has been neglected for quite sometime. And like tradition we crashed the server with our special breed of Man Hacks. 😛 Typical.

Oh yeah! Even did a bit of TF2 this morning. As usual everyone sucks in MvM, and I played for a bit with someone on the main server… Relaxing. 😛

I went outside O_o Also games

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We finally had some good weather today, so I decided to take a little walk. Also played a bit of TF2 with someone who was visiting one of my servers. It looked like they came for the custom maps. I played as a pyro and I have to say it looks like I haven’t lost my touch. 😛

Finished off the day with some Skyrimming. Defeated King Olaf and got the verse. I crafted myself a fur collar to wear.

20160316160146_1

Apparently I’m turning into a furry. Which is funny because I figured that was established in ESO:

ESOIII

What do my Skyrim characters and I have in common? All of our left eyes suck.

More fun with the Steam Controller

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steamcontroller

Yesterday I took it for a field test on one of my TF2 servers to see how it stacks up compared to other controllers or a Keyboard and Mouse. I went in as a Pyro with the default layout tweaked a bit to my liking. Not many people know it but the Steam Controller comes with a built in Gyroscopic sensor not too different from what you would find in a VR headset or a smartphone/tablet. I used that combined with the right touchpad and managed to get the drop on my enemies multiple times. Keyboard and Mouse will always be king IMO but this makes it great if you want to get away from your desk and just sprawl out in another area while doing basically the same thing.

The response time over wireless was amazing, in fact I didn’t notice any latency when I pointed my controller towards an enemy. The gyro sensor does take some getting used to though. I played it with some racing games and it does take some practice if you want to use the Steam Controller as a steering wheel, but it’s fun once you get used to it!

The Steam Controller also supports DOS games. I tried to play some Wolfenstein 3D but didn’t really care for it on the controller. However it handled the original 1996 Tomb Raider like a champ. I didn’t use the D-Pad as I find it to be too stiff compared to your typical controller, but the analog stick worked perfectly. Someone made a config that makes it handle kinda like the old Playstation controller. It was comfortable and I think even better since it has extra places for button assignments. For example sidestepping was assigned to the bottom bumpers of the controller instead of it’s more traditional spots like LT and RT, which to me felt more natural.

Overall I still haven’t regretted the pre-order. In fact it keeps getting better and better with every update. They recently introduced a shortcut menu that you can use to bring up keyboard shortcuts. It’s handy if you play games like Skyrim which have a big keyboard layout.

Open Thread

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So far I’ve just been taking it easy. On my first day I slept in quite a bit which I didn’t want to, but I was more tired than I realized. I’ve had to fix the TF2 servers then test them along with the Gmod ones. Spent a good amount of time on some of them today with Yutram. We destroyed n00bs and then chillax’d in the cinema watching some YouTube.

The next thing I should take care of should be the TF2 MOTD’s so that they point to the group page. Our group has expanded quite a bit since I’ve had the group page appear on each server’s message of the day.

We haven’t started working on the new hardware yet but will soon. We’re waiting for a couple RAID cards for additional storage, once those arrive we’ll be ready to install CentOS 7 and get to work adding all the servers to the new setup. Maybe even some new servers since I have plans for a few more.

In the process of gathering more footage

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I have some more gmod funtime footage to go over at a later date. I’d like to start filming some other stuff too as I feel like I’ve been uploading too much gmod in general. But it’s just too much fun with friends. 😛 I did try to capture some TF2 MvM footage but nothing noteworthy happened.