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Technical revolution of competitive TF2C: part III

Since part II of the series in August, CompTF2C has found a new administration under its most recent technician and reviver, Xinayder, and one of its earliest members and a PuG runner since last year, kotowski. Check out the initial announcement by Güven on Discord, and then admin kotowski’s Community log #1 for more insight on the transition.

Now CompTF2C again offers a pickup game schedule. It hosts a North American server once again, and just as the EU one, it is 24/7 online, acting as an MGE server outside of pickup hours. This full-time availability makes spontaneous pickup games a possibility for the future of the scene. The previous financial and technical collaboration with AltTab servers is over– saluting Jaws for his long-time service. Our new technician/host Xinayder has been providing a seamless experience so far. In addition, wider community support is enabled, with Ko-fi tips. You can tip Competitive TF2C once to get the Derby Booster role on Discord for a limited amount of time, or set monthly tips to become a member of Jenkins Coal Co. ☕

Logs

Let’s not hold back the biggest tech news anymore: TF2 Classified has proper logs. In the previous article we reported that some match stats looked promising upon uploading the server logs manually to logs.tf. That was after a test game with bots and had its own drawbacks. Now after a proper PuG, we can proudly show what the first-ever parsed logs of a TF2C game looks like (koth_bagel_rc12, September 12^th, 2026). Xinayder went further and installed F2’s Supplemental Stats v2 and Medic Stats to the servers, which both worked, and gave us the first extended stats of TF2C in the next PuG session.

For automated uploading to logs.tf at match end, F2’s LogsTF plugin has not been working. Xinayder recently collaborated with F2 himself for this, and fixed the problem. Hopefully, everybody will see their logs online right after the matches.

Xinayder also realized an event bug in our first VIPR (drizzle) logs and reported it, which got fixed with the patches released after the 30^th Anniversary Update (Issue #1162). (The previously-reported VIPR time limit cvar issue [#936] is fixed with the 30^th Anniversary Update as well!)

The vipr_drizzle, vip_harbor and vip_badwater logs revealed an anticipated problem– no VIP (Civilian) class definition in live TF2, obviously, and in logs.tf’s parser. In the Drizzle logs, we see no class icon at all next to Xinayder and kotowski, who were the respective VIPs of their teams. Harbor and Badwater have the dedicated VIPs (playing both for Team A and B of the stopwatch format) Zachery Callahan and orizyre recorded as Spy– their class before being voted as VIP. The positive thing is that the damage event logging is in parallel with live TF2’s, so the Umbrella and Cane strikes of those “spies” are recorded without errors.

Unfortunately, logs.tf is not open-source. The VIP issue was reported to the logs.tf developer zoob through whatever communication channel we have available, but there is no certainty if a solution will be implemented.

In the meantime, Güven made the first attempts for a logs.tf re-parser— a code that parses an online logs.tf log to calculate players’ VIP playtime and adds it visually onto a copy of that logs.tf page’s front-end on comptf2c.com. The effort needs a later revisit and thorough consideration, but it proved not to be impossible.

Caster HUD, pause bugs, stopwatch, config pack

A proper caster (spectator) HUD continues to be missing, leaving our scene unsuitable for a live stream up to the standards of today. EssentialsTF HUD relies too much on the improvements of CastingEssentials Next (CE Next) plugin, making it incompatible with TF2 Classified. We want to start small on this, and first have a spectator HUD that repositions the default player cards and slightly resizes them. The Improved Default HUD of Tiagoquix could be a good starting point. One of TF2C competitive scene’s prominent members, Shens, and one of our moderators, elektro, tried their chances as HUD hobbyists. These efforts resulted in no success. We would highly appreciate the help of a HUD master at this point.

During our tests, carried out by Güven and our moderator dekrzz, we detected two problems with the default TF2C spectator HUD (cl_use_tournament_specgui 1) even without any customization. Firstly, it overlaps the map and round timer (tf_hud_show_servertimelimit 1) (Issue #1205). (Special thanks to CE Next developer resin and EssentialsTF HUD dev criticalflaw for pointing out the required cvars.) Additionally, the RED team class portraits are missing as it was reported already (Issue #682).

In the last article we mentioned the pause bugs, in the context of casting the games neatly. It appeared to be an understatement. The pause bugs actually break the game itself, not only the spectator experience. This is also reported to the developer team together with resin’s solution (Issue #1204).

Finally, another casting standard we remembered and tested, the spectator x-ray vision, is also broken, possibly in multiple ways (Issue #1206).

The stopwatch fix for vip_harbor is still not implemented officially (Issue #960), however, the StripperSM plugin solution of Xinayder is working, and stopwatch is played with the game’s native functionality for the first time on October 10^th, on vip_harbor and vip_badwater, during the North American PuGs.

Regarding the match configs, CompTF2C has now fully established its new-era pack. It is a hybrid solution between the ETF2L pack, and the “CTF2C” one. A competitive TF2 Classified server is expected to install both packs, which work in tandem.

Overview of issues

Issue	Status	Details
Pause bugs	new📝	Issue #1204, reported with solution
Tournament spec GUI position	new📝	Issue #1205
Spectator x-ray vision	new📝	Issue #1206
Tournament spec GUI missing RED portraits	reported by another, pending⏲️	Issue #682
Tournament mode Ready Up 4teams	pending⏲️	Issue #977, reported with solution
Team status HUD	pending⏲️	Issue #1002
Tournament Stopwatch for vip_harbor	pending⏲️	Issue #960, reported with solution
Quick VIP selection	pending⏲️	Issue #1003
VIPR pointcaptured event trigger	new, closed ✅	Issue #1162, fixed in 3.1.1 or 3.1.2
Tournament mode Ready Up 2teams	closed ✅	Issue #958, fixed in 3.0.12
VIPR time limit cvar	closed ✅	Issue #936, fixed in 30th Anniversary Update

For twiikuu’s TF2 Comp Fixes plugin, last time, we said there is no 32-bit server binary to support the DHooks extension. Right after the article went live, we are informed by webb, a senior admin at Moon’s Pub, that there is an open pull request on GitHub to fix that. The request has still not been approved, however, it is possible to merge it in a new branch of SourceMod if needed.

The shortcomings SrcTV+ is possibly fixing, and whether it indeed fixes it in Classified, is yet to be tested.

We still have a long way to go, although the destination will always need maintenance every now and then. For now, we have a lot of new developments and features to enjoy and be happy about. It also seems like there is less and less new issues to be discovered. Soon, the scope of work to make competitive TF2 Classified technically viable will be fully defined. The road ahead will be more clear than ever.

EMINOMA will release version 3.2.0, the Chilling Halloween Special update, today. With it, potentially more fixes for the issues listed above. We hope you are as excited as us for it. Happy Halloween!

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