Interesting China Fact: Did you know China has a mafia? Did you know that, not only do they exist, they'll loan you money? And not even a little -- as much as you want! We hadn't even heard of them until last week, and now we're treating them like a cash machine. Seriously, these guys are nice. They've even started calling us all the time now, probably to ask how we're getting along with all that free money they gave us.

Anyway, the Chinese Mafia made their own game, Sleeping Dogs, so we've added some all-new items to TF in honor of our new best friends. Also, if anyone's seen Robin Walker, tell him somebody mailed us his hand, because he's probably looking for it.



Introducing eight new items available in the Mann Co. Store, or FREE when you pre-purchase Sleeping Dogs on Steam before August 14th.

Updates to Team Fortress 2, Day of Defeat: Source and Half-Life 2: Deathmatch have been released. The updates will be applied automatically when your Steam client is restarted. The major changes include:


Source Engine Changes (TF2, DoD:S, HL2:DM)

• Marked mem_force_flush as a cheat to prevent client exploits
  
• Fixed %n console crash in the client
  

Team Fortress 2

• Added new items:
  • The Red-Tape Recorder
    
  • The Huo Long Heatmaker
    
  • The Flying Guillotine
    
  • The Neon Annihilator
    
  • The Triad Trinket
    
  • The Champ Stamp
    
  • The Marxman
    
  • The Human Cannonball
• Added new promo items
  
• Fixed sappers attaching incorrectly to teleporters that are still building
  
• Improved reliability for finding a coach
  
• Fixed Engineer training shotgun and pistol images being swapped
  
• Fixed GetPlayerItems web APIs not respecting inventory privacy settings
  
• Quickplay beta: Fixed bug causing game servers to sometimes stop receiving traffic upon victory condition
  
• Quickplay beta: Added more status information while in the matchmaking queue
  

It isn't often documented, but there tends to be a lot of cross-pollination of ideas across the various teams here at Valve. There are a lot of talented folks walking around the halls here, and it's incredibly helpful to show them things and get their feedback, because with each round of feedback we'll manage to solve a problem or even find some new inspiration. Case in point: When the Source Filmmaker team was working on ideas for what the "Meet the Pyro" would look like, one of the ideas stood out. Not only were we amused at the proposed world of the Pyro, but immediately were thinking of how much fun it could be to play inside it.”

Of course, one of the immediate issues with this was how to bring the pastel color scheme and various whimsical storybook elements that made up Pyro's dream world into the textured world of TF2, with its more naturalistic palette and real-world setting. Achieving the Pyroland look would not only require creating a completely new texture set, but would have to be constrained both by texture memory and artistic resources.

Some of the things we ended up creating to solve this included, firstly, a replacement system that let us override the default textures in the game with an alternate version; and secondly, a new graphics shader system that we called "Pyro Vision". Here's what the final result was, but it took a few tries to get there.

<a href="http://media.steampowered.com/apps/tf2/blog/pyromania/pyroland_10_large.jpg"><img src="http://media.steampowered.com/apps/tf2/blog/pyromania/pyroland_10.jpg" width="420" height="240" border="0"></a>

<a href="http://www.teamfortress.com/post.php?id=8502">Read the full blog post</a>

It isn't often documented, but there tends to be a lot of cross-pollination of ideas across the various teams here at Valve. There are a lot of talented folks walking around the halls here, and it's incredibly helpful to show them things and get their feedback, because with each round of feedback we'll manage to solve a problem or even find some new inspiration. Case in point: When the Source Filmmaker team was working on ideas for what the "Meet the Pyro" would look like, one of the ideas stood out. Not only were we amused at the proposed world of the Pyro, but immediately were thinking of how much fun it could be to play inside it.”

Of course, one of the immediate issues with this was how to bring the pastel color scheme and various whimsical storybook elements that made up Pyro's dream world into the textured world of TF2, with its more naturalistic palette and real-world setting. Achieving the Pyroland look would not only require creating a completely new texture set, but would have to be constrained both by texture memory and artistic resources.

Some of the things we ended up creating to solve this included, firstly, a replacement system that let us override the default textures in the game with an alternate version; and secondly, a new graphics shader system that we called "Pyro Vision". Here's what the final result was, but it took a few tries to get there.



Read the full blog post

Updates to Team Fortress 2, Day of Defeat: Source and Half-Life 2: Deathmatch have been released. The updates will be applied automatically when your Steam client is restarted. The major changes include:


Source Engine Changes (TF2, DoD:S, HL2:DM)

• Fixed dedicated servers not being able to set sv_region
  

Team Fortress 2

• Fixed Replay/SourceTV clients getting kicked when quickplay servers hibernate
  

Source Engine Changes (TF2, DoD:S, HL2:DM)

• Fixed Unicode characters getting stripped from player names
  

Source Engine Changes (TF2, DoD:S, HL2:DM)

• Added sv_namechange_cooldown_seconds, to throttle clients from changing their name too rapidly. (Defaults to 20 seconds)
  
• Added sv_netspike_on_reliable_snapshot_overflow to selectively enable the automatic dumping of netspike file if a client drops due to "reliable snapshot overflow" (defaults to 0, which disables the debugging)
  
• Added check to prevent player names from containing color codes
  
• setinfo console command will now reject attempts to set / change convars with any unusual characters
  

Team Fortress 2

• Fix a bug that caused gameservers to not properly receive client inventory updates. (Frequent cause of the "The server you are playing on has lost connection to the item server" error message.)
  
• Fixed not being able to equip all-class items properly
  
• Fixed the DX8 water effect
  
• Fixed the Beggar's Bazooka misfiring with 100% crits after firing a crit rocket
  
• Fixed the Strange Sandman not accepting the Posthumous Kills strange part
  

Source Engine Changes (TF2, DoD:S, HL2:DM)

• Fixed a client crash on exit (after connecting to a server using sv_pure)
  

<img src="http://www.teamfortress.com/images/posts/summer_sale_2012.jpg" width="420" height="240" border="0">

To celebrate the <a href="http://store.steampowered.com/" target="_blank">Steam Summer Sale</a>, we’re having our own Mann Co. Store Sale on some of this year’s Workshop items, along with other goodies such as name tags, description tags, and various paints, weapons and hats. We’ve also added new summer bundles, featuring new items from the Pyromania update in various packaging flavors. The sale runs today through July 22.<br /><br />

To celebrate the Steam Summer Sale, we’re having our own Mann Co. Store Sale on some of this year’s Workshop items, along with other goodies such as name tags, description tags, and various paints, weapons and hats. We’ve also added new summer bundles, featuring new items from the Pyromania update in various packaging flavors. The sale runs today through July 22.