As we all know, Jonas Salk invented money in 1955 so he would have a way to earn a living from his polio vaccine. Before that, people just traded things they found for things that other people had found. So you might "sell" somebody a scrap of carpet, say, in exchange for an old bottle. It was a perfect system with only one drawback: people spent their lives bartering for piles of garbage before dying of polio.

But wait. What if we told you that you could barter for things that weren't garbage, AND not die of polio? Steam Trading Beta lets you securely trade your in-game items for other in-game items from participating games. You can also trade Steam gifts (games on Steam that you've purchased but not yet added to your Games Library).

Want to try it out? In Steam, go to Steam > Settings, and opt into Steam Trading Beta. That's it! Now your Steam Community profile will have an item inventory, and you'll be able to view the item inventories of every public profile in the Steam community.

Now that you've opted into the Trading Beta, you can invite people to trade through Group Chat, and trade with anybody in your Friends List who's also opted in. Just right-click on their name and select "Invite to Trade" from the dropdown menu. Once your friend accepts your offer to trade, a trade window will open up. The first time you open the trade window, a step-by-step walkthrough will guide you through your first trade.

That's it! Opt in and get trading, or surf over to the Trading Beta FAQ for the nuts and bolts. And remember: Trading is still in beta, so don't forget to give us your feedback here on the Forums.

Updates to Team Fortress 2 have been released. The updates will be applied automatically when your Steam client is restarted. The major changes include:

Team Fortress 2

• Renamed The Tamrielic Relic to The Dragonborn Helmet
  
• Updated The Original, The Dragonborn Helmet, The Anger, The Pip-Boy, and The Wingstick so they can be purchased/crafted/traded/found
  
• Updated the gamehaptics file
  
  • Added draw/recoil/reload/crit forces for The Original
    
• Updated the localization files
  

<img src="http://www.teamfortress.com/images/posts/soldier_quake.jpg" height="215" width="420" border="0">

It was way back on August 24th, 1996 that the first version of Team Fortress took its first feeble baby steps out into the world. At the time it only had five playable classes, no maps, and--believe it or not--no hats. There wasn't even a concept of teams yet. That's right, we didn't actually get teams into a game called Team Fortress until a couple of releases after the initial launch. (The next time someone says their game isn't ready to release yet because they're missing a core feature, you can helpfully point this out to them.)

What the initial version of TF did have, though, was a Soldier class wielding the original Quake's iconic weapon, the rocket launcher. Now, fifteen years later, thanks to Bethesda and id software you too can wield that same rocket launcher in TF2, original sound effects and all.

It ended up being surprisingly difficult to integrate the Quake rocket launcher into TF2, mainly because any time we started working on it, we'd get sidetracked by hours of reminiscing: about that first Quake game, about its impact on us all personally, and on Valve overall. When Quake celebrated its 15th birthday this past June 22nd, we realized just how damn many of us at Valve are here because of id software. Some of us were inspired by their games' technical prowess, and others by getting their first taste of game development thanks to Doom and Quake's revolutionary approach to user-generated content.

So, thanks id, for... well, everything.<br />

<a href="http://store.steampowered.com/"><img src="http://www.teamfortress.com/images/posts/quakecon_sale.jpg" height="38" width="420" border="0"></a>

As long as we're here, we might as well tell you how to actually get your hands on that rocket launcher we've been getting all misty-eyed over. If you've been living under a rock, you may not be aware that <a href="http://www.quakecon.org/">QuakeCon</a> started today. We're celebrating with a <a href="http://store.steampowered.com/">QuakeCon Steam Sale</a>, where each day we'll have a new Bethesda title on sale. We've built TF2 items for pre-ordering Rage and The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, and whipped up an awesome Brink mask for those of you who own Brink (which also just released some <a href="http://store.steampowered.com/app/22364/">free DLC</a>). <a href="http://store.steampowered.com/app/2210/">Quake IV</a> landed on Steam today as well, and buying that will net you The Original Quake rocket launcher. We're also big Fallout fans, so we politely sent a few thousand emails to Bethesda until they let us build a replica Pip-Boy for the Engineer, which you'll get if you own <a href="http://store.steampowered.com/agecheck/app/22380/">Fallout: New Vegas</a>. Note that all of this only runs the length of QuakeCon, so keep an eye on the QuakeCon Sale.<br /><br />

It was way back on August 24th, 1996 that the first version of Team Fortress took its first feeble baby steps out into the world. At the time it only had five playable classes, no maps, and--believe it or not--no hats. There wasn't even a concept of teams yet. That's right, we didn't actually get teams into a game called Team Fortress until a couple of releases after the initial launch. (The next time someone says their game isn't ready to release yet because they're missing a core feature, you can helpfully point this out to them.)

What the initial version of TF did have, though, was a Soldier class wielding the original Quake's iconic weapon, the rocket launcher. Now, fifteen years later, thanks to Bethesda and id software you too can wield that same rocket launcher in TF2, original sound effects and all.

It ended up being surprisingly difficult to integrate the Quake rocket launcher into TF2, mainly because any time we started working on it, we'd get sidetracked by hours of reminiscing: about that first Quake game, about its impact on us all personally, and on Valve overall. When Quake celebrated its 15th birthday this past June 22nd, we realized just how damn many of us at Valve are here because of id software. Some of us were inspired by their games' technical prowess, and others by getting their first taste of game development thanks to Doom and Quake's revolutionary approach to user-generated content.

So, thanks id, for... well, everything.




As long as we're here, we might as well tell you how to actually get your hands on that rocket launcher we've been getting all misty-eyed over. If you've been living under a rock, you may not be aware that QuakeCon started today. We're celebrating with a QuakeCon Steam Sale, where each day we'll have a new Bethesda title on sale. We've built TF2 items for pre-ordering Rage and The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, and whipped up an awesome Brink mask for those of you who own Brink (which also just released some free DLC). Quake IV landed on Steam today as well, and buying that will net you The Original Quake rocket launcher. We're also big Fallout fans, so we politely sent a few thousand emails to Bethesda until they let us build a replica Pip-Boy for the Engineer, which you'll get if you own Fallout: New Vegas. Note that all of this only runs the length of QuakeCon, so keep an eye on the QuakeCon Sale.

Updates to Team Fortress 2 have been released. The updates will be applied automatically when your Steam client is restarted. The major changes include:

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

• Added a check to prevent kicking Replay and SourceTV clients from servers
  

Team Fortress 2

• Added new items for upcoming promotions
  
• Fixed a case where health overheal wasn't being applied when multiple healers were involved
  
• Fixed the new Gravelpit backgrounds using the wrong filename
  
• Updated the Mask of the Shaman
  
• Updated the localization files
  

Updates to Team Fortress 2 have been released. The updates will be applied automatically when your Steam client is restarted. The major changes include:

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

• Fix a crash bug during changelevel when the Steam client is unable to init
  
• Reduced the frequency of diagnostic messages for out-of-range positions and velocities
  

Team Fortress 2

• Added the Red Orchestra 2 promo items
  
• Fix a crash bug related to the Righteous Bison
  
• Fix a bug where the increased_maxplayers server tag was being set when the 25th internal player slot was added for replay
  
• Fixed a bug that caused team color paints to appear to be coming out of the wrong cans for the store icons
  
• Updated the main menu backgrounds to include Granary and Upward
  

Updates to Team Fortress 2 have been released. The updates will be applied automatically when your Steam client is restarted. The major changes include:

Team Fortress 2

• Added From Dust promotional content.
  
• Fixed a problem with the application of team-colored paints.
  
• Fixed Mac-only replay editor crash.
  
• “Meet the Medic” startup music added.
  
• Definitely did not add cheats for upcoming Free-2-Play Invitational Cup.
  

Updates to Team Fortress 2 have been released. The updates will be applied automatically when your Steam client is restarted. The major changes include:

Team Fortress 2

• Fixed a damage calculation in the Mantreads on Linux server, which could cause a physics crash
  

Updates to Team Fortress 2 have been released. The updates will be applied automatically when your Steam client is restarted. The major changes include:

Team Fortress 2

• Fixed a Mac client crash triggered after selecting a team
  
• Fixed a couple of replay issues
  
• Updated the localization files
  

Updates to Team Fortress 2 have been released. The updates will be applied automatically when your Steam client is restarted. The major changes include:

Team Fortress 2

• Corrected the damage ramp for the Cow Mangler 5000 and the Soda Popper
  
• Fixed a rare crash bug with the Demoman TFBot laying stickybomb traps
  
• Fixed a bug that would cause team-painted wearable gibs to show an incorrect color
  
• Fix memory leak when updating the item schema
  
• Fix an occasional crash on game exit
  
• Replay updates
  
  • Client
    
    • Added basic/rough render queue for internal use to increase replay output for relaunch trailer
      
    • Block files are now deleted on replay reconstruction (i.e. viewing), to conserve disk space
      
    • Unneeded block files are now cleaned up automatically on startup
      
  • Server
    
    • Fixed fileserver cleanup
      
    • Any time replay_fileserver_offload_hostname is modified, the corresponding IP is resolved and cached, if possible. This fixes a crash, as well as failed publishing due to "unresolved hostname" errors.
      
    • Added a fileserver IP lookup test to replay publish test
      
    • Setting replay_enable to 0 now halts recording and does cleanup automatically, the way replay_stoprecord does. This fixes a crash that would occur when replay_enable was set to 0 and a changelevel was executed.
      
  • Replay temp directories automatically cleared on startup on both client and server
    
  • Memory management improvements
    
  - Added ConVar demo_fov_override, which overrides the FOV during demo playback if the value is non-zero