why not make a steam chat pickup bot

CS is not worth taking if you can't get into a good university. Mediocre universities will teach you how to use specific languages and operating systems. This knowledge will make interviewers at bad companies happy, but you'll hate yourself working a job like that and more importantly, you can learn it yourself.

Want to learn to program? Download Sourcemod and start writing silly TF2 plugins. Want to learn Linux? Install an interesting distro (CRUX, gentoo, arch is decent, not ubuntu...) and use it. Make sure you actually use it, not in a VM (installing in a VM for practice is good though) or dual-booting into Windows 90% of the time.

Good universities will teach you the science. They will assume you can already write code and if you can't you will be expected to learn it, by yourself, very quickly. The languages used in the course will be whatever the lecturer that year likes the most (mine used Haskell, Scala, Java, OcaML, C, C++, PHP, CUDA, ...). They will teach you material that can be applied to every language including the half dozen that you will create, every OS and every job. When you apply to a good company, they will test your knowledge of this material, and not the Java standard library or the arguments to ls.

If you aren't able to get into a top university for CS but you still want to be a programmer, apply to something else (biology, chemistry, maths, etc) and learn to program in your own time. You can use your programming ability to differentiate yourself from everyone elseG and you won't feel like you're wasting your time.

For the curious, I can answer questions both here and in private based on my experience studying in the UK.

edit: don't take software engineering unless you already self harm

Write a raytracer.

The theory involved in making a direct illumination renderer is really surprisingly simple and the maths required is not terribly hard. You also end up with flashy as fuck screenshots to take after doing not a lot of work which is going to look more impressive than a crap game or calculator. Here is a nice tutorial.

Additionally, if you actually enjoy working on it, state of the art renderers (Renderman [Pixar], Arnold [every film in the past 5+ years], Maxwell/Indigo [architectural renderers], etc) are built on these foundations. You can follow the ideas all the way through your undergraduate degree and into research as part of a grad program or working for Disney if you want to.

disclaimer i literally just did a GI renderer for my thesis

I got a mechanical keyboard about 4 years ago when they were still being marketed as being nicer to type on for extended periods/help with RSI.

They are worth it if you are actually having problems with wrist pain because once you get used to it you stop bottoming out on the keys this has been said a million times before etc etc

Then for some reason (can produce £20 of plastic and sell it for £100 i guess) mongoloid gaming companies picked them up and said they would make you better at video games which is dogshit it doesn't make the slightest fucking difference.

If you've never noticed NKRO while playing (actually playing, not just hammering every key trying to make it not register) you don't need it. The key feel doesn't make any difference when you are just bottoming out anyway.

also if anyone lives within hearing distance of you they will kill you

edit: also2 consider that 1) you can buy ~30 keyboards for the same price as a mechanical one which will last a lifetime unless you are inbred 2) people are referring to the 30-40 year old IBM keyboards when they say it and not the newschool mechanical keyboards which have been around <10 years if you want to bring up the "but they last so much longer!!" argument

from an outsider's point of view:

haha you are all mugs for playing in ESEA again

http://tf2pug.heroku.com/topics/5987-ban

http://www.dotallyrad.com/2014/01/cal-reloadeded-possible-scam/

Any way to draw team coloured text on your HUD? I want a red/blue clock

Oh I see.

I don't like adding complexity like this. More so when it's something that would be helpful to have on the HUD but can't be.

I also think that so long as you don't make the return timer so long that 1/2 people can respawn and bomb-reset the flag forever it will be like suiciding onto points in cp - allows clutch plays and not actually a problem at all.

We have games with ctf and bhopping already. I want to see people make maps that play off the movement mechanics TF2 has now (like all of our current maps do) without having to worry about ctf's inflexible/terrible ruleset ruining everything.

The plugin lets you disable touch returns and adjust the flag return timer already. It defaults to 10s which I think is good enough

I don't think wsw ctf is good but I wanted examples

in cp scouts cap points while everyone else dm's 8)

i'm going to bump this because i think my ideas are great

Me neither, because of bombers being able to suicide+return the flag.

Eh. If TF2 CTF had this it would be like every other arena shooter but worse. We have enough games where 1 person on each team has all of the fun while everyone else gets to eat shit and bodyblock the flag from homing missile players.

I expect if you're good enough to hold the flag forever then you're good enough to just win anyway (keep in mind I am suggesting we ban all the idiotdefense classes too). This could probably be mitigated with sensible map design too. If that doesn't work it's easy enough to add a "shot clock" like the stalemate thread. Make it so the flag resets if you don't cap within 2 minutes or something.

edit: actually the sticky/rocket jumper could make problems with this :D

I think CTF in TF2 has the potential to be fun but in its current state it is dogtrash and noone plays it.

So I made a plugin to fix some problems with its ruleset: https://github.com/mikejsavage/tf2-ctftrue

You can't capture without having your flag at home. This prevents teams just trading caps forever and avoiding confrontation.

Touch returns for the defending team. A 60s timer allows teams to bomb onto the flag/uncloak a spy on top of it forever until they finally man up and grab it for real. I'm not sure if touch returns is the best solution as it allows bombing onto the carrier for the return. So...

Adjustable flag return time. 10s timer stops a team from homoing the flag to their goal and stops soldiers from homoreturning it.

Throwable flag. its kinda fun 8) i can take it out if it sucks (doesn't really work atm anyway)

Other low hanging fruit: noone but shitlords wants to play with engi/pyro/heavy at the best of times so obviously limit0 them here

The plugin by itself isn't enough though because apparently noone in the TF2 mapping community has any clue how to make a CTF map that isn't appalling.

I'm going to bring up maps from Warsow (wsw CTF is bad I know but their maps are very good and it's the FPS I know best) to use as examples.

yea my screenshots are horrible just dl the game and look around

wctf1
http://youtu.be/VtskQrUcyCA
http://youtu.be/VxzpMMRtfF0

This is a good map. There is a pair of parallel low routes through mid entirely shielded from each other, then attackers need to ascend the base to the flag room at the very top. There is a 1way teleport from the top to the bottom and a 2way tele from below the flag to across from the flag.

wctf4
http://i.imgur.com/dALOn6x.jpg (mid overhead)
http://i.imgur.com/wlG4rvC.jpg (standing in mid, there is another route which goes behind me)

This is a decent map. There is a low route through mid, 2 mid level routes and a high route all mostly shielded from each other. These all converge in the flag room. The sightlines are enormous and the routes are all too easy to accelerate in so rails/1200ups carriers get tiresome.

wctf6
http://i.imgur.com/cjlJTiS.jpg (mid, showing the 3 routes)

This is a good map. There are 3 parallel routes through mid, 2 high and a low all mostly shielded from each other. The bases also have a high and low level with the flag being on the upper level at the back of the base. There is a 1way tele from the flag room to just before mid and another 1way tele from the last tele to the upper level near the flagroom.

wctf2
http://i.imgur.com/O79deDH.jpg (mid)

This map is awful. The screenshot is of the only route through mid. It plays like every TF2 CTF map where the stronger team holds the single route through mid and the weaker team holds the single route into their flagroom forever and nothing happens and it's a total shitfest.

old wctf5
(i don't have any screenshots and this map is no longer in the game)

This map sucked. There were 2 routes through mid but one of them was on top of the other (like doublecross) and the flagroom was deep++ inside the base with basically one route to it. iCTF was ok on this map because a sufficiently good carrier would have 8 people's worth of fun while everyone else sat on their hands. With stock weapons you couldn't hit the same tricks or speeds, the flagroom was too hard to get into and all the spawns were between mid and the flagroom so it played like 2fort.

The points I am trying to make with this:

Stop making idiotic terrible maps with a single route through mid and add routes to the flag room that don't go straight past the defensive spawns. Ideally the safer route should be longer so you can actually intercept the flag if they want to be scared.

Teleports are cool and I'd like to see someone try a map with them in TF2. They give the carrier a break a break where they aren't visible or taking damage from direct chasers and allow creative interceptions. On the other hand the TF2's simplicity is one of it's strong points and they might end up being stupid.

Turbine gets things partially right but not enough. Attacking is almost always go in and out of lower and defending is always hold middle. mach4 looks like it might actually be playable.

The bright side: I just told you how to make good maps so you can go do it now. Some of the existing CP maps also have nice layouts for CTF and I believe it's possible to make a plugin to make CTF playable on CP maps although I am not as familiar with mapping as I was when I quit 4 years ago so I could be wrong. http://tf2.gamebanana.com/maps/75513 would probably honestly be playable in regular TF2 but recompiling maps shits up the lighting so everyone would QQ, but this is the kind of thing I mean.

I made a post but i dont think i came across as having an inferiority complex enough so it's never going to see the light of day on reddit:

I think the best thing for TF2 would be making CTF playable.

I wrote a mod a few years ago that added configurable return timer, touch returns and flag throwing and made it so you can't cap without your flag in base. I added it to instagib (except flag throwing) and it was much more fun than stock CTF but I don't think it ever got used outside of iCTF.

If people want to play with something like this, I can dig it out and update it so it works again.

A few things:

1. cl_interp 0.01, cl_interpratio 1 make things feel less laggy
2. bhopping is fun but it gets really cheesy and tiresome. i don't know how it is in thraawn's version but with the original mod we eventually disabled it because when ppl get good at it you can do spire to spire in 1 instajump and it's stupid
3. http://tf2.gamebanana.com/maps/75513 if you don't have it already
4. arena if you haven't tried it already