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Team Fortress 2 SDK Update Includes Source Files For 10 Maps

Posted by Soulskill on from the have-at-it dept.

Valve recently announced on the Team Fortress 2 blog that they are releasing the source files to 10 of the game's maps, making it much easier for fans to customize them. They also said they'd be releasing more source files for maps and models in the future. "Here's the list of maps that are included in the update: Lumberyard, Ravine, Badlands, Dustbowl, Granary, Gravelpit, 2Fort, Badwater, Goldrush, and Hydro. For the beginner map makers out there, we hope this gives you an easier entry point by allowing you to alter or edit an existing map, as opposed to being forced to start from scratch. ... We also hope that it'll reduce the amount of confusion around the game logic and entity setup required for the various TF game modes."

4 of 52 comments (clear)

  1. I loved this by Lifyre · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I remember when I was making maps for CS:S many years ago having the source for one of the maps was awesome. Everyone liked dust but I wanted to add some variety and put a sewer and such in. It makes it real easy for someone to make variations of a fun map so it isn't the same thing every go round.

    Hell I've been told by friends that still play CS:S there are variations of my maps still being played, which is kinda sad honestly.

    --
    I'll meet you at the intersection of "Should be" and "Reality"
    1. Re:I loved this by icsx · · Score: 4, Insightful

      It's good thing that Valve supports the community and shows how they do things. People can learn by just opening the vmf files. In the past they had to decompile the original maps with vmex software but the decompile wasn't always 100% correct. Some Areaportals and such were left off.

      Beginners mappers will do mostly remakes as it's rather easy but not all of them are interested of doing something original. These just released files are more inportant to the people who already know some mapping and perhaps have made some work of their own already. Only problem there now will be is the countless remakes of their maps. Some people do not see the problem in this but as a guy who runs TF2 servers or plays a lot of custom made maps, i can safely say that 95% of the remakes will be crap, won't be played on many servers and will have only minor fixes. As the map sizes are somewhat 30-50MB, it's also kind of pain to download the countless remakes since some servers do not provide fast downloads to their maps in-game.

      There are some successfull remakes of the original maps too, which incorporate separate game modes. For example Dustbowl was made to Payload map and it is quite successfull. I could see how Granary would become a nice Payload Race mode map with the hands of someone.

  2. Coming soon... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Another three hundred derivative and mostly unoriginal versions of 2Fort, including at least one where every texture is porn.

  3. Re:And nothing for the 360 by FOOSE · · Score: 4, Informative

    http://www.tf2.com/post.php?id=2394

    "The XBox 360 update is still being worked on. If you're wondering what's taking so long, since the content is "done" on the PC already, it's mostly been around fitting it all onto the XBox. The original version of TF2 in the Orange Box was very close to the XBox's memory limit, and all the additional TF2 content we've produced has pushed well beyond it."