Team Fortress 2 Update Released

[tf2.com]

An update to Team Fortress 2 has been released. The update will be applied automatically when you restart Team Fortress 2. The major changes include:

• Strange misc-slot items that are tradable can now be listed on the Steam Community MarketUpdated The Bearded Bombardier and The Bolted Bombardier so they can be equipped with glasses

Community request:

• 
  Added modelscale and SetModelScale input to Studiomodel so map authors can use them to scale models

Source: TF2.com

 

[DonutVikingChap]

Added modelscale and SetModelScale input to Studiomodel so map authors can use them to scale models

Wow, neat :O

 

[Sergis]

finally in 2013 we have a feature unreal engine had since 1998

 

[Crash]

Wait... really?

Awesome.

 

[Trotim]

There's one additional thing that Valve added with this update that's currently only accessible through mods like SourceMod: m_bForcedSkin and m_nForcedSkin properties on players, that, as you imagine, let you force the skin a player uses regardless of what team they are on. I had written a plugin to make both RED and BLU fight together in MvM, but it was horribly hacky as it involved faking teams to clients. With this, I can revise the mod to work cleanly without that hacky method, but something tells me Valve may be planning to do the same.

http://www.reddit.com/r/tf2/comments/1mzheg/tf2_update_for_92313/cce3nqp

 

[Ælement]

• 
  added modelscale and setmodelscale input to studiomodel so map authors can use them to scale models

yes

 

[A Boojum Snark]

wow. I never thought I'd see that.

 

[Fruity Snacks]

Source 2 confirmed.

 

[Ptimz]

How do we use this?

 

[Pocket]

Personally, I kind of preferred that people didn't just get to hack models to fit whatever size they felt like instead of the logically correct size. It meant that the burden of making models correctly to scale was on the model makers, for one thing. I can see this getting horribly abused in the future by map makers who have a poor sense of scale and insist that, no, it's the model designers who were wrong, every single time. As well as people using normal props as skybox props despite having way higher polygon counts than skybox props are supposed to.

 

[fubarFX]

but the size is dynamic, think about it! inflating props here we go!

 

[Freyja]

How is this any different to $scale

 

[fubarFX]

it works post compile

 

[A Boojum Snark]

There will always be people who misuse the tools provided. Having the feature available will be great. Off the top of my head the best use will be for nature props like trees and rocks. Toss in ~15% size difference across your props throughout the map.

 

[Lampenpam]

There will always be people who misuse the tools provided. Having the feature available will be great. Off the top of my head the best use will be for nature props like trees and rocks. Toss in ~15% size difference across your props throughout the map.

This would be awesome of course, so for example the same tree model could look different by giving every prop a induvidual size.
But unfortunately I doubt it works on static props. I can't check it at the moment, but I heard it's only for dynamic and physical props (can the colisions model be scaled as well?)

But even without scaleable static props, it's an awesome feature which should have added long ago.

 

[fubarFX]

now who's going to be the first to make a crazy shrink laser spytech map?

 

[A Boojum Snark]

This would be awesome of course, so for example the same tree model could look different by giving every prop a induvidual size.
But unfortunately I doubt it works on static props. I can't check it at the moment, but I heard it's only for dynamic and physical props (can the colisions model be scaled as well?)

But even without scaleable static props, it's an awesome feature which should have added long ago.

I know the input wouldn't work because static props are not entities, but I would think the key should work. It would be disappointing otherwise.

 

[Ælement]

Why wouldn't it work for static props btw?

We can already choose whether or not it should be solid and cast shadows. Couldn't the size be something that is determined during the compile, and then be unchangeable for the static prop?

 

[Pocket]

I want to know if they plan to incorporate this into their other games after this. This is one problem with splitting their engine up into different branches for every single game: Useful features tend to end up in one or two games when they ought to be in all of them. Remember fast alt-tab switching? I don't think it was until the SteamPipe/Linux updates that their single player games finally got that, and it was never officially mentioned in the patch notes even so.

 

[EArkham]

I wonder if this will work correctly for models with animations. If you try to use $scale with an animated model, it has no effect on the animations so you end up with something from The Thing. But the fact that the Headless Horsemann uses demo animations makes me think that this new scale thing WILL work.

I never finished my Poopy Joe character because it meant custom animations, but if I can rig him to one of the classes (and use their animations), and then use this to shrink him down, that would be epic.