blueeAs a small note to other HUD makers that want a custom style, this was done as a one-off for TotH; the lack of updates from me has been because I'm trying to find a way to avoid adding more crap to this file.

I'm not a C++ dev but I know a fair bit of C. Looking at that, wouldn't it be simple to literally just scrap the entire damned thing for only one draw method and then just have properties of it be filled in via parameters, which could be defined by configs/commands/cvars? I mean, it would be quite a refactor, but wouldn't it be better in the end?

Also dear god is the flvhud advspec version horrendous. I mean, it looks great and I'm really glad it's there. I don't at all mean your work isn't appreciated; seriously, good going dude. For what it was meant to do, it functions fantastically. But not only is your warning about it not scaling well for other HUDs important... It doesn't scale for anything outside of the original setup. If TF2's resolution isn't 1080p, not only does it not scale with the rest of the UI correctly, but even the goddamn offset cvars are off. For example, I'm at 1600x900. When I set advspec_medic_info_offset_y 17, it actually offsets by about 25 pixels. I guess I'll just use it in the bottom left of the screen rather than try to integrate it with my player list.

MasterKuniEngineer repair node was removed from final game because it made buildings too difficult to destroy and slowed the game down, but they still added the wrangler?

Keep in mind that repair nodes could stack over allied buildings and multiple repair nodes could repair each other. Also, an engineer didn't have to stand by his buildings in order for them to heal, like he practically has to do in combination with the Wrangler. Also also, the Wrangler only applies to his sentry, and not all buildings at once.

Additionally, it actually was intended to replace the Dispenser or Teleporter. The real reason this was removed (besides being imbalanced) isn't actually mentioned in the video, and it reeks (in a good way) of Valve playtesting. They felt that replacing the dispenser or teleporter (the two most important buildings) with a building that literally only aided allied Engie buildings was incredibly selfish of the Engies involved, and led the rest of their team to not view them as team players (not having a dispenser for ammo or teleporters to get to the field faster is a death sentence in most cases).

Made a video showcasing AdvSpec and my leaderboard, but mostly showcasing SpecTools. Enjoy!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OO24V0xwP1c

DougyttriumMaybe even show a notification for when a player has left spawn as a new class.Holy shit, that would be fabulous. Is it possible to show a notification when this or a medic with kritz happen?

SpecTools actually notifies you of medigun changes already, but it's very rudimentary. It was added in the latest update, and can't be customized too much. It's basically a text popup and you can tell where it should appear (mostly; you can't center it so you have to guess and based on the name it gets misaligned) but you can't change the text size or type or anything like that. If Suyo manages to make his own spec UI, he could easily add a pretty notification that appears next to the Medic that shows an arrow saying "Kritz" or "Medigun" or "Quick-Fix" or "Vacc" or something. Also for debug purposes please Jon and Suyo implement a console command to send a fake medigun change so the notification is triggered, for setup purposes.

Arr[all this stuff]

Fuck it, I'm just going to make a whole video showing off SpecTools and our setup. Would be great for people to see it in action and would be great for people to see how other casters have things like their leaderboard set up.

Suyohoolican you perhaps make this plugin emulate the tf2 spectator hud so we can just get rid of the tf2 spec hud?
I'm trying that with the AdvSpec source code right now - all that's left is class icons, finding a better way to get the CTFPlayerResource entity, and a solution to deal with the order of players changing when offclassing (in that screenshot, the only class being sorted into a fixed position is Medic)

EDIT: An idea for sorting I had would be to make it a command, which would sort the players on execution and save their entities, so it wouldn't shuffle around. Downside is that casters need another bind to do that sort. How does that sound?

First off I just want to say this is fucking ridiculous that an unsigned plugin has to be written that will only work in insecure mode just to fix HUD bugs for a game like this. Seriously Valve, step it up, you're almost getting as bad as Bethesda, where the community fixes more issues than you do.

Anyway, back to you; fantastic work, seriously. It looks great. Do you think you can make the plugin load our current HUD files and make it look like our old HUD did, or would that be too much effort? If not, could we customize it with commands similar to SpecTools?

As for alignment, why not have an alignment key that casters can press to re-align classes if something gets messed up, but just force an alignment right as the match starts, in Scout Scout Soldier Soldier Demo Medic order, and then from then on (unless the command is used), just keep it aligned by the previous order? So if a scout switched to sniper, it'll go Sniper Scout Soldier... or Scout Sniper Soldier depending on who did it. That way everything is consistent. Maybe even show a notification for when a player has left spawn as a new class.

ArrIndeed, it does. You can check parts of the plugin used in the latest tf.tv cast.
Here's how we got it set up at the moment:
[image snipped]
Notice the custom overlay I made for the team health in the left center.

Pretty much every element is toggleable using key binds, including the minimap, health bars, names, etc.

Really like the clean left-aligned look to it. Nice integration of the team HP too, and I absolutely love your bottom left team lineup. Do the icons mean cast/chat/cam, from top to bottom?

Just to compare, here's how we have it set up at the moment:

http://puu.sh/8zUs9.jpg

Our leaderboard is done with a program called StreamControl. I can easily edit any of those text fields or flags with just a few clicks and they'll be seamlessly faded in and out as soon as I hit save.
The bars above and below the players are the team health bars, added in the latest update. In this picture you can also see the circle on the incoming sticky. I also have the minimap appear in the bottom right corner, but this image was taken on Coal Plant, which isn't yet supported by the minimap so I just turned it off; looking at Granary isn't great.

Finally I've also got an extensive list of custom keybinds for instant player switching, basically here's the setup for 6s:
1 Scout, 2 Scout, 3 Soldier, 4 Soldier, 5 Demo, 6 Medic, 7 Sniper, 8 Heavy, 9 Pyro, 0 Engie, - Spy
Those binds switch to the Blu team. Function keys are for Red (F10 for Engie, F11 for Spy).

You can also load configs on the go with Num9 being Highlander, Num6 being 6s, and Num3 being 4s. NumPlus toggles minimap visibility. Each format config has different settings for everything; for example, the Highlander config is far more aggressive with fading than the 6s and 4s configs are. Also, in 4s, player names are shown. Minimap icon sizes also change based on format. There's also Num0 for pausing/unpausing an STV demo, Num1 for opening the demoui, and Num2 for hud_reloadscheme (dastardly pauses!).

If anybody wants help getting a setup like this, feel free to PM me.

Edit: Oh, I forgot to share the part I spent literal days on! You can also hold Shift and it hides all health bars, and then press one of the class keys to selectively enable them. Combinations work (you can hold down Shift, 1, and 5 to see all scout and demo health bars) and they temporarily disable damage blinking for better clarity. This was actually a major pain to get working cleanly; all simple setups for it caused misalignments when releasing certain keys and not others.

Luc (RdRand) and I have been using our own configs that I wrote on Monday since we started casting on Monday. Basically it binds 1-0 and F1-11 for class assignments, and has three variants you can access by hitting the 9, 6, and 3 on your numpad, for HL, 6s, and 4s, respectively. The class positions according to number change based on the layout - for instance, in 6s, 1 and 2 are the first and second scouts, 3 and 4 are the first and second soldiers, 5 is the demo, and 6 is the medic. 7-0 are reserved for off-classes. Normal numbers are Blu, and F numbers are Red.

Tonight I'm going to modify the configs so that you can hold Ctrl (or maybe Shift or Tilde?) in order to force all health viewing to that class rather than switching to the view of the class. After I successfully get that working, I'll upload the configs for you all to enjoy. They also have different fade distances for the different formats (fading is going to happen a lot faster for Highlander, for instance) and a few other neat tweaks. Also, I'll be sure that health filters will remove fading completely (at least for some classes) so that you can always view the health bar, since you're intentionally focusing on that one class.

Bluee asked me to post a tutorial on how to get your game window to still fit fully in your screen even though it's outputting at the higher resolution that you told it to with SourceRes. Side effects include mouse detection being misaligned in-game (aka you can hardly use the mouse), horrible downscaling (very pixelated because it uses a nearest neighbor technique; you can see the before and after (native and shrunken w/ SourceRes, respectively) here and here. Those screenshots are simulated but it gets the point across; in practice it'll probably look even worse.

Anyway, you need to install GameCompanion from here. This utility is used for many other games in order to force a borderless window output mode. Essentially it strips the borders from a window and then stretches it with a form of overlay to fit across the screen. This will stretch with nearest neighbor techniques so if you output to a resolution that isn't your native res (usually lower, but in our case, higher), the result will look atrocious, as shown earlier. After installing GameCompanion, open it and find out what your "Manual FFMode" hotkey is. Mine is Ctrl+Enter, but I don't recall if this is the default. Anyway, start TF2 now with the "-windowed -insecure" parameters (additionally "-novid" or any other parameters, but do not use "-noborder", as I'm not sure how it behaves with GameCompanion). Once it's launched in a window, use SourceRes in the console to target the output resolution you want - for example, to make your game output at 4K, you'd enter "sr_forceres 3840 2160". Then, once it's adjusted your resolution, hit Ctrl+Enter (or whatever your hotkey is/was) while still in the console. Staying in the console is entirely optional, but is definitely more convenient as the "enter" key will probably trigger a menu button, and you'll want the console open afterward anyway. This should stretch your window to fill your primary monitor.

From here, you're pretty much done. You're viewing a downscaled version of the incredibly high res game now, but even though your view is downscaled, all images and videos will be rendered at the SourceRes resolution. You can close GameCompanion when you're done capturing. Enjoy!

EDIT: In order to reassure based on previous complaints, mouse tracking should only be broken for navigating menus and things of that nature. Rotating for thirdperson shots should be okay.

EDIT2, 10 months later: For those of you trying to get this to work, be sure that in GameCompanion's settings window, in the Options tab, you have FFMode set to Type2, not Type1. Be sure to restart both GameCompanion and TF2 fully once setting this option for it to take effect.

Also, are you taking map requests? ESEA is playing on cp_sunshine_rc1a this week, so I took an image for that map.

cp_sunshine_rc1a
scale: 10.00
pos_x: -10583
pos_y: 9169

GentlemanJon It's not the difficulty that's stopping me, it's the boredom of implementing it. I'm just not likely to prioritise it over other commitments. Your best bet's to have a crack at it when I release source.

oh god source for this masterpiece is going to be a thing get hype

I suggest putting it on something like Github so you can take pull requests that become official.

GentlemanJonI'm not suggesting it's the best way, but the scaling should work and the chances of me coding an anchoring system are very small.

For the 1920x1080 resolution, 1.2 times larger than yours, I'd suggest a left position of 1560 and top of 650. Keep the map scale as 2. For 1280x720, 0.8 times the size of yours, I'd suggest 1040 and 433.

I'd be interested to know if it produces satisfactory results.

Developing an anchoring system wouldn't be hard. I've got a class coming up in a few minutes but when I get back I could even draw up some pseudocode that only contains if statements and definitions for values. I'd happily do the hard work for you if it meant this could be a thing.

Alternatively you could always just have offset from left, right, top, and bottom, and if top is defined, undefine bottom and use top, if the user then defines bottom, undefine top and use bottom, mirrored for left/right. Not sure if that'd be possible with event handlers but I'd assume it would be.

GentlemanJonI found a bug with smaller resolutions when looking at this so I'll upload a fixed version soon.

The size of the map is scaled, so if your resolution is 1280*720 and your co-caster is running 1920*1080, then the proportion of width and height is 1.5, so if you have the map horizontal position at 800 then multiplying it by the proportion of width and height should give you 1200 and it should appear in the same place on your co-caster's screen. Using a different aspect ratio obviously means this is harder, it's not a use case I looked at during design.

The issue isn't for offset from the top left, specifically. The issue lies in if you want it to be affixed to the bottom right. Let's say, I have a 1600x900 monitor (which I do) and I want the minimap size to be 2 (doubled) and affixed to the bottom right. I have the horizontal_pos set to 1300 and vertical_pos set to 542. For 1600x900, this looks fantastic. However, as soon as you want to give this to another user (1280x720 or 1920x1080), you need to recalculate everything, remembering the size and offsets from max. It's a pain and while you could do it manually with trial and error for smaller resolutions, it's near impossible for larger ones.

Raw pixel offsets with anchors is honestly the best solution. Every decent GUI framework out there, even WinForms, uses this method.

GentlemanJonI'm aware of this and from memory it can be solved in first person, but then causes unstable display in third person. However my understanding has moved on from then so there might be a solution now. I'll look into it.

I think it would be totally acceptable to just disable it in third person as well if you can't find a proper workaround.

I'm going to be using this in all of my team's productions.

Feedback so far:
The health bar shouldn't appear for the player you're currently viewing if viewing that player from a first person cam. It flies all over the top of the screen depending on where they're looking. Not good.

The minimap shouldn't have "horizontal pos" and "vertical pos", it should use anchors and offsets. For example, four vars: "anchor_top 1", "anchor_bottom 0", "anchor_right 1", "anchor_left 0" would anchor it to the top right, and then "offset_x 50" would offset it 50 pixels from the right of the screen (to the left of the right side), and "offset_y 10" would offset it from the top that amount. Currently, in order to put the minimap in the bottom right, you need to know the exact resolution of your display in order to make it look decent at all. This means I can't share my exec with my co-caster running a different resolution unless I customize it specifically for him, and I can't because his resolution is above mine.

Other than that, fantastic work. Maybe some more customization options would be nice (change health bar's outline color?) but it's a fine piece of work.