This was, sadly, an unacceptable word in Bookworm Adventures Deluxe. I’m guessing possibly because it is two words and there was no space.

I’ve been tinkering around with a custom Team Fortress 2 menu for a couple of months and decided that I wanted it completed in order to move on to other things. So, now it’s finished and I offer it to you.

Changes from original:

• Moved all the buttons on the lower right to the main area of the menu.
• Training added as a sub-button of the “Start Playing” button.
• New sub-buttons added for backpack and crafting.
• “Options” button moved up to main area.
• “New User Forum,” “Developer Commentary” and “Report a Bug” added as sub-buttons of the “Options” button.
• Added four direct server connect buttons that are easily customizable.
• Added a “Reconnect” and “Class Loadout” button.
• Moved the “Mute Players” button and made it much larger.

Installation:
Download and unzip the file. Copy “GameMenu.res”  into “…\Steam\steamapps\[user name]\team fortress 2\tf\resource”. Then copy “MainMenuOverride.res” into “…\Steam\steamapps\[user name]\team fortress 2\tf\resource\ui”. If the folder does not exist, you will have to create it.

Customize the direct connect servers:
After installing the files, navigate to “…\resource\ui” and open “MainMenuOverride.res” in Notepad. Press CTRL-F to bring up find and type in “JoinServer1″. Go down to the “labelText” field and to the right of it, replace what is in the quotations with whatever you want to name the server. Look a little further down and find the “Command” field. To the right in quotation marks, replace the server IP and port with the one you want. Repeat this process for “JoinServer2″, “JoinServer3″ and “JoinServer4″. Save the file when done.

Download Here

This is an interesting video that is linked (multiple times) in the comments of a Kotaku article writing on a blog post titled “Why do the Japanese Draw Themselves as White?” I am very surprised at the amount of commenters who are still reading the article through only one… cultural perspective(?), given the point of the article and the nature of the site itself. Perhaps they just lack knowledge of anime and manga history.

“Why Do Japanese Characters Look White?” [Kotaku]

There are metric ton of “How To’s” for rocket jumping in Team Fortress 2 and I’ve probably watched most of them. None of them really compare to honorablejay‘s videos though, at least in terms of covering everything from the beginning.

Below I have compiled some console commands that are standard in most Valve games, the majority of which are useful in multiplayer:

• cl_showfps – A simple output of framerate. 1 is real-time, 2 is averaged over the past second.
• clear – Clears all console output.
• condump – Dumps the text currently in the console to condumpXX.log.
• connect – Connects you directly to a server, e.g. “connect 209.246.142.33:27015″.
• cvarlist – Shows the list of convars/concommands. Following the command with a letter will limit the output; “cvarlist a” will output a list of only commands that start with the letter A.
• disconnect – Disconnects from the multiplayer server and returns you to the main menu.
• exec – Executes a config, e.g. “exec myconfig.cfg”.
• exit – Exits to desktop.
• find – One of the most useful commands, finds concommands with the specified string in their name or help text. Typing “find” followed by any partial or full command will give you all of the commands that have those letters in the command or definition.
• help – Outputs help info about a convar/concommand. It is similar to the find command but you have follow it with the exact command. You will be given the command definition as a return.
• key_findbinding – Finds key bound to specified command string. Follow this with any command or alias and it will tell you if there are keys bound to it.
• key_listboundkeys – Lists bound keys with bindings.
• kill- Kills yourself.
• net_graph – Draws the network usage graph. This puts a graph on screen that, depending on the number you follow after it, will give you varying amounts of network information.
• quit – Exits to desktop.
• retry – Reconnects to the last server you were connected to.
• status – Displays map, connection status, and more importantly, server information and Steam IDs.

These commands can be very helpful when used in conjunction, an example being  saving a hacker’s Steam ID. You would open the console and type “clear” to get rid of the old information, then type “status” to output his Steam ID. This would be followed by a condump to easily save all of the info into a file on your hard drive without alt-tabbing out of game.

[Valve Developer Community - Console Command List]

I was recently vote banned (for hacking) while playing Team Fortress 2 and just so happened to be recording a demo. This was on a SourceOP server which is a bit disappointing because they usually seem to attract the more mature players. It was just a temp ban but regardless, it still jarated me off.

I’ve been chugging along completing games, trying to reduce the size of my “to play” list that seems to grow more often than it shrinks. Following are some brief thoughts about the games that I’ve finished but didn’t write on:

Grand Theft Auto IV: The Lost and the Damned

Pros
+ Better handling for motorcycles.
+ Addition of mid-mission save points.
+ Coolest gun so far in all GTA games: the Street Sweeper.

Cons
- Poor story and character development; you really don’t care about Johnny.
- Broken Free Roam in multiplayer.

Grand Theft Auto IV: The Ballad of Gay Tony

Pros
+ Multiple mission save points.
+ Return of fun missions not seen since San Andreas.
+ Luis was more like Niko, a likeable guy with no conscience.
+ Parachute and Automatic Shotgun.

Cons
- Some of the activities needed for the 100 percent were excruciating.
- Not being able to kill Rocco, a major flaw.

Chronicles of Riddick : Escape from Butcher Bay

Pros
+ Great characters and voice actors.
+ Fun melee combat.
+ Enjoyable story.

Cons
- Autosave system can save in horrible times resulting in nearly impossible missions.
- Weapons are taken from you regularly.
- I waited too long to play it and it didn’t age well.
- Certain story elements go against mythos established by the movies.

Torchlight

Pros
+ Beautiful stylistic world.
+ Highly mod-able.
+ You can send your pet to town to sell for you.
+ Rewards are often upgraded loot.
+ Occasional difficulty spikes, which could be remedied.

Cons
- Death Penalties too steep.
- No online play.
- Only three classes.
- No information on skills.
- No reskill without mods.

Crysis Warhead

Pros
+ Same great graphics of Crysis.
+ Gameplay wise, more enjoyable and fun than the original.
+ More focused while maintaining sandbox environment.

Cons
- AI still a little too easy to outsmart.
- Vehicle segments.

Reasearch and Development

Pros
+ Great quality for a mod.
+ Easily completable in one or two sittings.
+ Everything felt like it belonged in the Half-Life universe.

Cons
- One puzzle I had to lookup online on how to get passed.

So let’s just come out and say it: where the @#$% is EP3? Of course, I’m refering to Half-Life 2: Episode Three.

Shortly before the release of Episode One, Valve said that the trilogy “will conclude by Christmas of 2007.” [Gamespot] Right after the release of EP1, in an interview with Eurogamer, Gabe Newell said:

The original Half-Life took us two years to develop. With a considerably larger team Half-Life 2 took us six years to develop, so we thought if we were going to continue our trend with Half-Life 3 we would basically ship after we had all retired.

We’re trying to come up with a better way of getting more timely updates…

They proposed that moving to an episodic release schedule would get games out faster but below is a breakdown of the acutal timeline, along with other Valve releases for scale:

1998/11/19 – Half-Life
2004/11/16 – Half-Life 2
2006/06/01 – Half-Life 2: Episode One
2007/10/10 – Half-Life 2: Episode Two (in the Orange Box, with Portal and Team Fortress 2)
2008/11/17 – Left 4 Dead
2009/11/17 – Left 4 Dead 2
2010/08/13 – date of this post
2010/??/?? – Portal 2

A year and seven months passed from the release of Half-Life 2 to the release of EP1, then a year and four months to EP2. With an ever shortening time frame, we should have expected EP3 a little over a year later. But here we are two years and ten months later and not only are we not playing EP3, we haven’t even heard anything about it.

In January of this year, a rumor coming from Game Informer magazine stated the following:

[There] won’t be any game from the [Half-Life] franchise in 2010, and what will finally come out is still unknown.

So if we aren’t to expect a Half-Life game this year, what is Valve planning? Some of the speculation out of that rumor is that they may just ditch EP3 and go straight to Half-Life 3, which seems possible given the long duration of nothingness and that the Orange Box Source engine is graphically far behind today’s standards.

Another possibility is that Valve is trying setup another Orange Box-like scenario with multiple games in one release. Part of what feeds that particular idea is that Portal 2, which was planned for a release later this year, was delayed until sometime next year. If that’s the plan, there are other games which could be packaged alongside those two, the first of being Defense of the Ancients (DotA). Valve recently hired the current developer of the mod who is now leading a team at Valve. Also, earlier this week, Valve trademarked DotA.

My purely speculative guess of another 2011 release would be Black Mesa, the total Half-Life conversion mod which has been in development for six years. Valve has a habit of buying up-and-coming mod and game developers, especially those with the professional quality of Black Mesa.

No one really knows what Valve is doing next and they have traditionally been very good at shutting down leaks. We’ll just have to wait and see.