Almost there

Hi all!

I said in the last update that this one would contain the date of the next round of testing, and I was half right! But first, where are we up to?

What have you been doing recently?

Most of our time, until last weekend, was spent finishing and perfecting the design implementation, and I'm happy to say this is now complete for the initial version. There are some things that will probably be missing from the first release (that I'll get to shortly) but everything we're planning to put in is designed and styled.

This week we've been playing the fun game of Front-End meets Back-End, which is going largely to plan. We hope to have this finished by Wednesday (23rd) of this week. After that comes some internal testing to make sure we haven't missed anything, and then we head towards the initial, limited-time release.

We've also been given the use of some virtual machines for hosting the site and game servers. The machines themselves are pretty awesome and should allow us to host a whole load of game servers for you guys to use.

Running some benchmark tests on the application server VM. I think it'll be okay.

What's the limited-time release?

We've tested the site ourselves. We've tested with a handful of friends. We've tested the multi-user aspect of things as much as we can, considering there's only a few of us! We've even abused Chrome's profiles to get as many instances of the site running as we can at one time, to see what the performance is with many clients connected. But this is obviously different from the real-world, many tens / hundreds of concurrent users.

Jayserp's PC got sad at running more than 80 individual instances of Chrome

As such, we will (at a date yet to be determined, but likely within 2-3 weeks) be opening up TF2Center for a roughly-one-day open beta test. That is, the site will be available for everyone to use, but just for a limited time. At the end of the day, the beta will be closed and we will go off and fix any bugs that came up, check out our logs and make sure we're happy with how everything was running from our end. The final open release date will depend on results from this open beta, and we'll be inviting as many people as possible to give us their thoughts and feedback.

We stress that during this open beta, things may go wrong and the fixes may (in the worst case) require the server to be restarted or the beta to be closed early. We don't expect this to happen but the open beta comes with the disclaimer that things may break, and we ask for your patience if these situations arise.

We'll keep you posted with updates as we get them. Any questions or comments, as usual let us know here, via Steam or email info@tf2center.com.

Foxy

New Features

Let's spend some time going over some of the features that players will see in the TF2Center lobby system, because we think they're pretty cool. Lobbies now-a-days have many pain points that make them not as enjoyable as they could be, and we've spent time and effort to find these points and remove them as best we can.

Missing Players and connection tracking

It's frustrating, isn't it. You spend 10 minutes waiting for a lobby to fill and start, and then someone doesn't turn up. Or drops mid-game. And not only that, but the hassle it seems to cause people to actually report them as missing, you'd think they prefer to play with a huge disadvantage!

Well, not only will we be able to track and display each players current connection status (differentiating between not yet connected, crashed, and genuinely disconnected), but we use this data to automatically report missing players after a set length of time. We've tried to keep this from being too aggressive against players who connect slowly, but we can detect whether you're connecting or just not there, and handle the situation accordingly. This will continue throughout the match, so if someone drops during the match and shows no signs of returning, we'll automatically call in a sub. And if the sub drops, we call in another sub. You get the picture.

Mumble Integration

Everyone likes good team work - that's why we play competitively. Unfortunately lobbies can lack this, and having 9 headless chickens run around isn't fun for either team. In-game voice does a job, but the quality is poor and the delay of a few seconds can be important at times, and is especially frustrating when there are solutions out there that give so many benefits.

Mumble is one of the more popular solutions for TF2 team play - it's easy and free to install, doesn't use much in terms of resources, and comes with a nice discreet overlay that you can move or turn off as desired. As well as hosting a free mumble server for use by all our players in general, every lobby that is created will have dedicated team channels created to allow quick and easy communication. Obviously this only works if people adopt it, but seeing as the gains massively outweigh the installation time, we think it will be great.

Roamer / Pocket seperation

Sometimes it's the little things that make a difference. A standard 6v6 team has 2 scouts, 2 soldiers, demo and a medic. The soldiers are split into roaming soldier and pocket soldier. Well, so are the slots. No more getting into a game and arguing about who is which, decide when you take the slot!

Class restrictions and slot reservations

I've already touched on these in a previous post, but just to highlight the details here again (since we think they add so much). Certain slots can be reserved for friends by use of a custom password. We know this enables "lobby stacking", but it already exists -- it's just now, you won't be getting kicked for no reason over and over again!

Class restrictions add certain requirements onto a class, so that the important classes in a lobby aren't taken by people with no knowledge or experience. Lobby creators can choose to put restrictions on any class or the entire lobby, and restrictions are based on any combination of number of lobbies played, lobby reliability, or overall hours in TF2 (as reported by the Steam API).

Stock servers

There are times when players are calling for a lobby, but no-one has a server available. TF2Center will be hosting so-called "stock lobbies" to help with this, along with a lobby voting system. I'll go into more detail on this at a later date, but the general idea is that players can vote for lobbies they want to see created, and periodically if there are enough votes, we'll spawn that lobby on one of our own servers.

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We want TF2Center to be an accurate representation of what the community wants in a lobby system. We have a pretty good idea based on our own experiences and what we've been told by players, but if you have any suggestions then let us know!