A Grave Blow to Team Fortress 2 Modding

[Legendsmith]

For those who don't know, Team Fortress 2 had/has a vibrant modding community. This community also created and maintains staple admin plugins andmods such as MetaMod: Source, Sourcemod, SourceOp, Manimod and other such mods that are used by server admins everywhere to administrate servers which includes things like shared banslists, different levels of admins and even standard things such as changing maps, kicking and banning troublesome players etc. (No, the source engine does not have this without these mods.)

(For clarification, the mods are the base. Plugins literally "plug in" to these mods to add more functionality.)


These mods, especially Sourcemod and Metamod serve as a platform for various things, including custom gamemodes like:
VS Saxton Hale Mode
Dodgeball
Zombie Fortress
Weapon Randomize
Advanced Weaponiser (added new weapons)
TF2Ware
PropHunt

The problem? The Uber/F2P Update broke every single one of these mods.Manimod brokeEventscripts broke
Sourcemod broke.
Metamod broke.
SourceOp broke.
Every base mod broke.

On top of that, every plugin (except a select few) broke. That includes every custom gamemode (except possibly Prophunt).

How, what's the significance of this? Well, something like this doesn't happen by accident. Sure, occasionally updates would break one or two plugins, but never everything. This was deliberate; Team Fortress 2 has been locked down. As has every other game using the same engine, including Half Life 2: Deathmatch, Left 4 Dead and Left 4 Dead 2.

Even Garry's Mod, a game that revolves around addons and plugins (and is itself a mod) was effected by this. As anyone who plays Gmod regularly will know, the game was 'broken' for about 2 days.
But not just that, vehicles in gmod were broken. Why? Because Valve deliberately broke the code for vehicles that is built into the source engine.
Obviously, this effected gmod since vehicles are often used by players to build stuff. It's been fixed now, but it's interesting to see how valve broke it even though (to my knowledge) it wasn't being used by anything other than Garry's mod.

Sourcemod is back and working so server admins can now administrate their servers again; but it's severely limited. Enormous amounts of functionality has been removed that won't be able to be reinstated.
As far as I know, the VS Saxton Hale Mode has made a return after being broken for 3 days and some of the other custom gamemodes may be fixed by their respective developers, but that's not what I'm concerned about.

With putting in these 'guards' Valve has made modding Team Fortress 2 extremely difficult. any sort of player-by-player modding is either highly inefficient or impossible. I have been an observer in the development of an RPG plugin that would accompany VS Saxton Hale. Players would get buffs according to their level if they were the only one left to fight Hale.
I was excited every time the developer of this plugin gave me more news about what he was doing. The plugin was progressing and looking quite good.
Then The Uber/F2P Update came out and I get one more piece of news from my Developer friend:
His plugin is essentially broken indefinitely.
Other developers have had huge amounts of work essentially destroyed. This isn'y something that required a few tweaks. Big rewrites have to be done and some of them aren't going to happen, because developers don't want to have to try to get their plugins to work within the now extremely restricted confines of the once amazingly moddable source engine.

Oh, and Team Fortress 2 and all other orangebox source engine games now use more system resources to maintain these guards. Not to mention the plethora of other things that were broken. Things that were part of the game itself.

So, Escapists; what do you think of this?
Personally, I'm sad and angered about this. Team Fortress 2; a game based on the mod Team Fortress is now restricted.
It's easier to go to all the trouble of building up your own game from scratch using the Source SDK than it is to try to make a server mod for Team Fortress 2.

I just have to Ask; why? Why do this? In the name of Free to Play?

Oh and before anyone says to prevent exploits and hackers; sourcemod, metamod, etc themselves prevented many exploits and hacks through use of plugins. When a new glitch/exploit is found there is often a sourcemod plugin to fix it within days.

 

[Riobux]

I would of thought Valve would make a press release about this, mainly because they're the ones who encourage modding above all other developers as far as I'm aware. For them to intentionally break mods seems a bit on the bizarre side. My only idea why would be because it's now free to play.

 

[Pearwood]

When one mod dies two rise to take its place.

 

[icyneesan]

So thats why my Touhou Fortress 2 models aren't working anymore... Damn you valve... This is even more of a sin then ignoring the fact that you havent mentioned anything about Episode 3...

 

[KeyMaster45]

I would of thought Valve would make a press release about this, mainly because they're the ones who encourage modding above all other developers as far as I'm aware. For them to intentionally break mods seems a bit on the bizarre side. My only idea why would be because it's now free to play.

But why do such a thing simply because it went free to play? It's not like mods were cutting into Valve's bottom line. It's a troubling thing to hear most assuredly, but due to the good will Valve has fostered with it's modding community over the years I fail to see how deliberately putting the boot to them would be beneficial.

My question is what's Valve's side of the story on all this. The information presented by the OP sounds alot like speculation and conjecture made by the modding community. Has there been any response from Valve on the situation or are they remaining silent since I assume their modding agreement says they're not obligated to support the modding community.

Troubling, but I will reserve my nerd rage until I hear a statement from Valve on the matter.

 

[ThriKreen]

Considering how many mods there are out there, there's no real way for Valve to keep track of it all and make sure their stuff doesn't trip over another team's project.

 

[Jewrean]

Well I bought team fortress 2 on steam ages ago. There was heaps of hacking. To the extent that I have never played the game again. Maybe it was just a series of freak occurences? Either way, at the time, the hacking seemed very prevalent. So from MY perspective it's a good thing to limit hackers. That being said, I feel for you guys in the modding community and hope that the damage is undone in near the future.

 

[DazZ.]

Doesn't this happen with almost every update? I'd kind of expect a big update to break mods here and there.

I highly doubt it's intentional.

 

[Legendsmith]

Well I bought team fortress 2 on steam ages ago. There was heaps of hacking. To the extent that I have never played the game again. Maybe it was just a series of freak occurences? Either way, at the time, the hacking seemed very prevalent. So from MY perspective it's a good thing to limit hackers. That being said, I feel for you guys in the modding community and hope that the damage is undone in near the future.

No, there wasn't. There were just players who had beta tested and therefore were good.
Oh, and that material hack that let people see through walls. But that wasn't code based, that was just going into the game files and basically change the texture of a concrete wall to be transparent, allowing you to see through concrete walls ingame. It's the same principle as re-skinning stuff in tf2 to give the scout camo pattern trousers and putting cool decals on the rocket launcher.
There's no need for this. Not to mention that I said in the OP how sourcemod plugins prevent hacks from working. In any case; there's quite a bit of stuff that has been broken which no hacker could conceivably use.

My question is what's Valve's side of the story on all this. The information presented by the OP sounds alot like speculation and conjecture made by the modding community. Has there been any response from Valve on the situation or are they remaining silent since I assume their modding agreement says they're not obligated to support the modding community.

Troubling, but I will reserve my nerd rage until I hear a statement from Valve on the matter.

Well yeah, as I said in the OP, my question to valve is "why?"

Doesn't this happen with almost every update? I'd kind of expect a big update to break mods here and there.

I highly doubt it's intentional.

I just stated that it was
Yes, occasionally an update will break one or two things. I said that in the OP.
See, occasionally sourcemod breaks (my main experience is with sourcemod FYI). This is because of engine changes where things are shifted around, etc.
But it doesn't always effect the plugin scripts. Or, certain event hooks that plugins "plug into" are changed, renamed, etc, so the plugin breaks and has to have a bit of code rewritten.
It's not huge stuff, although it does add up.
This update broke erverything.
This did. Before, an Admin could set a player on fire. This is a function that has worked, well, forever. Now, it causes an instant server crash.

I would of thought Valve would make a press release about this, mainly because they're the ones who encourage modding above all other developers as far as I'm aware. For them to intentionally break mods seems a bit on the bizarre side. My only idea why would be because it's now free to play.

My thoughts exactly. There's no press release, nothing in the patch notes... Nothing. It's like they don't want people to know.


I'm sure many of you are wondering what the big deal is here. Well, it's hard to see what was possible unless you were looking at it, but here's some things. Don't think about "how is this balanced?" or that kind of thing. This is stuff that could have been possible, really fun stuff that you could create a gamemode around.

Any weapon could be customise on an amazing level. Want a rocket minigun? It's yours. (I've actually tested this. It's so fun. It' does the same amount of damage as a minigun, except it's splash damage.)

You could have scouts building minisentries, or quadruple jumping. Heavies with guns that get a damage buff when they've got a medic healing them.

Whole new gamemodes could have been possible. an TF2 RPG would have been possible. Start out at level one and level up by killing enemies, gaining better weapons and even heal buffs as you progress.

Any kind of custom weapon could have been made, using custom weapon models. The possibilities really were endless.
Were.

 

[Legendsmith]

It happens every now and then but usually its fixed so quickly. In fact Saxton Hale mode seems to be working fine now, I was just playing it a minute ago.

So long as it doesn't happen every update I don't mind too much.

Did you actually read my post?
This isn't one or two things breaking.
This is everything breaking on every platform.
That has never happened before.
So many things are locked down.
For example; models and animations. No more serverside custom models. No more serverside animations to go with those custom models.
If a dev wants to make a mod that uses them; they can't. Advanced Weaponiser is permanently broken in that respect.
There's no real reason to do this. You can't "hack" these things to give an advantage ingame.

 

[Sandytimeman]

I know we had alot of problems with new spammers and trolls the first day or two because of admin tools being down on my favorite servers. The mute and kick features seem to be working fine now. GameME plugin that our server uses is also fully functional still. But I don't think that Valve would just stomp on the modding community. Hopefully they give us a reply soon

 

[scotth266]

I looked up "TF2 mod broken" and found that mods being broken via updates is a common occurrence, according to the Steam forums. However, they're not complaining about it right now, so this looks fishy.

Methinks this is someone trolling because the game went FTP.

 

[Mokumbo_Jojumbo]

Looks like Valve is killing any possible competion here. Hmmmm ... well ... i wonder if this could be compared to how Blizzard shutted down all those Lua scripters a few years ago.

 

[tombman888]

Um, actually, most of them are working. At least, the ones i've tried have worked.

 

[dfphetteplace]

And your proof of this is?

 

[9999squirrels]

Why would Valve try to hurt the thing they constantly encourage and recognize. They probably just changed something deep down in the code which happened to affect the mods.

 

[mew4ever23]

Quit talking out your ass, this happens every few updates. Granted, it's never been this severe, but completely breaking mods does happen. Ask someone who maintains a WoW plugin, and they'll tell you that Blizzard unintentionally completely breaks mods all the time. Heck, ask the Minecraft modding community. Notch somehow finds a way to completely break nearly every mod every patch.

I should also mention that Prophunt works fine, I played a few rounds last night.

 

[Neverhoodian]

I'm not sure what the OP is talking about. I connected to a server running the "Vs. Saxton Hale" mod just one day after the Uber Update with no problems whatsoever.

Assuming what you stated is true, it's not the first time an update has caused issues with third party mods, and it probably won't be the last. Also, Valve has a track record of being very supportive of such creations, and will most likely address this issue in the near future.

 

[Sleekgiant]

Where are you getting this info from exactly, this just seems like wild speculation.

Also if SourceOP servers were all down, Drunken_F00l would have said something.....I think you just broke your copy of TF2.

I would test and see if you are wrong but TF2 has died on me and won't load at all.