Just my five cents, but would it be possible to merge/build a hud around these tools to make more informative & pausebug free spectator hud?

Instead of using health values & medigun stats tied to player models, use fixed positions to act as an part of a hud that would be made specifically made around these tools?

I can see an argument for fixing the bugged hud code (if it were possible, this is questionable) but this isn't really the purpose of the project at this stage. It's general aim is to provide advanced tools to aid identification of details at a glance for those who need it such as casters, players doing STV analysis and interested STV viewers.

The effects on cast streams are just being experimented with at this stage. I think an additional hud project would be too much right now, but it might make an interesting offshoot at some point either by me or if someone used the source when it's eventually released.

Really didn't mean it specifically for you to do, just threw my idea out because there really are lots talented people in this community and we've been receiving flood of new huds lately so maybe somebody will catch the idea and do something totally new.

Sadly i'm not one of those people.

Is it possible to add pre-set "cameras" with specific coordinates and angles throughout the map using keybinds? I would like to switch to a bird's eye view from time to time, just like SourceTV's camera does automatically.

I'll look into this next time I'm working on it

Has anyone actually downloaded and used it? Wanna know if it works before installing it all!

(looks incredible though!)

Definitely works, and you're right, its brilliant. Casters are beginning to use it now too!

Thank you!

Indeed, 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:

http://puu.sh/8vWHc/5af3220416.jpg

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

Legit plugin! Been using it in my casts and it's been very helpful and well received.

Notice I take a huge hit to FPS when I turn on the show stickies thing.

I hadn't noticed, I'll look into this.

can you perhaps make this plugin emulate the tf2 spectator hud so we can just get rid of the tf2 spec hud? i think it would be a good idea because 1) the tf2 spec hud breaks during pauses. 2)it doesn't sort players by class. having consistent class positions would make it easier to read the situation at a glance instead of taking an extra moment to read which classes are down. for 6s it should be, from top to bottom: scouts, soldiers, demo, medic.

Ho-lee shit

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

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.

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 one is the caster, second is the commentator and third is the cameraman.

The top looks superb, such a smart and neat way to show that kind of information. I'm totally stealing the flags idea.

I have been looking for something like this in the last couple of weeks, actually. I'll take a look and see how well it works during our streams. It's getting sad to alt tab to notepad just to change the score.

Those commands make it really easy to blend Spec Tools' information with your HUD. Sometimes people don't even realize they are completely different things, and ask in chat for the name of the HUD.

We have been using 1 through 9, - and = to switch classes in 6s; 1 is red medic, 2 is blu medic, and so on.

I started working just last night on a couple of scripts similar to yours, but instead will be used for HL class selection: 1 is red medic, shift 1 is blu medic, 2 is red demo, shift 2 is blu demo, and so on. Good idea to keep binds for switching around competitive types, that means less files to tweak and more useful functions. I like the per-class health bar toggle, too.

Good job, I love to see how other casters and camera people are using Spec Tools.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

It is super encouraging to see people that I don't really know about making amazing shit with Spec Tools, and overall amazing looking overlays/packages for casts. This is honestly a huge great thing.

Sticky!

I should point out the intended use is for casters so they don't miss it and say "Oh, Kritz!" after 4 players are killed by the first sticky, and they can give the big kritz pop it's proper build up so the need for formatting niceties wasn't really a design consideration beyond the ability to make it bright green roughly in the middle of the screen.

Also, forum sticky \o/

Sticky woohoo!

I just wish a few aspects could be customized:

• Duration, it only appears for what, two seconds? It needs to be like 6 so I don't miss it in case I was paying attention to something else.
  
• Font size! For some reason, maybe it's just my resolution but it looks tiny to me. Very easy to miss.

I'll put it on the (now extremely long!) to do list, it does have to compete with a lot of other stuff unfortunately.

Fonts are such a pain in the ass in Source, I need to look into them in more detail to provide some good quality options. When most of the text stuff was done I was just happy it wasn't crashing, which it likes to do. There's a good chance you'll end up having to have a good knowledge of the fonts in your Hud to be able to customise.

Also as a general gripe C++ strings are a modern day torture device. Overall working with text is so unpleasant I just don't like to do it, but you're right, it's something I should look at.

Right now it's all hardcoded, but bluee is planning to create a way to customize the AdvSpec UI so once that's done, I'll most likely work with that to make it similar.

Triggering it when a round starts does make sense. I'll try it out.

How about making the player/medigun bar glow for a bit after a change?

This is great, thankyou.

So I watched the cast, and the health bars helped a LOT with seeing how fights were going. Its really an awesome addition.

One issue I have though is that the red and blue blend in to tf2 too well. They don't offer enough contrast I feel. When a person loses a chunk of health, it's a little difficult to really see how much they lost quickly.

You could just keep the background as white when health is lost, and use a different color overlay for overheal. Also, a lot of fighting games show recent health lost in a different color, but idk if that's even possible.

I think a line on any kind of health bars signifying what non buffed full health looks like would be awesome. Like if there was an indication of what the team health should be with no buffs, just to base the value off something

Here's the script I said I was working on a few days ago. It's far from perfect as it's made around my own preferences, but it works and I think it's very easy to use.

This goes in cast_6v6.cfg:

alias redmedic "spec_player_cc 2 5"
alias reddemo "spec_player_cc 2 4"
alias redsoldier "spec_player_cc 2 3"
alias redsoldier2  "spec_player_cc 2 3 1"
alias redscout "spec_player_cc 2 1"
alias redscout2  "spec_player_cc 2 1 1"
alias redsniper "spec_player_cc 2 2"
alias redsniper2  "spec_player_cc 2 2 1"
alias blumedic "spec_player_cc 3 5"
alias bludemo "spec_player_cc 3 4"
alias blusoldier "spec_player_cc 3 3"
alias blusoldier2  "spec_player_cc 3 3 1"
alias bluscout "spec_player_cc 3 1"
alias bluscout2  "spec_player_cc 3 1 1"
alias blusniper "spec_player_cc 3 2"
alias blusniper2  "spec_player_cc 3 2 1"

alias redoffclass_pyro  "spec_player_cc 2 7;bind 9 redoffclass_heavy;"
alias redoffclass_heavy  "spec_player_cc 2 6;bind 9 redoffclass_engie;"
alias redoffclass_engie  "spec_player_cc 2 9;bind 9 redoffclass_spy;"
alias redoffclass_spy  "spec_player_cc 2 8;bind 9 redoffclass_pyro;"

alias bluoffclass_pyro  "spec_player_cc 3 7;bind 9 bluoffclass_heavy;"
alias bluoffclass_heavy  "spec_player_cc 3 6;bind 9 bluoffclass_engie;"
alias bluoffclass_engie  "spec_player_cc 3 9;bind 9 bluoffclass_spy;"
alias bluoffclass_spy  "spec_player_cc 3 8;bind 9 bluoffclass_pyro;"

alias +campick "bind 1 redmedic;bind 2 reddemo;bind 3 redsoldier;bind 4 redsoldier2;bind 5 redscout;bind 6 redscout2;bind 7 redsniper;bind 8 redsniper2;bind 9 redoffclass_pyro;"
alias -campick "bind 1 blumedic;bind 2 bludemo;bind 3 blusoldier;bind 4 blusoldier2;bind 5 bluscout;bind 6 bluscout2;bind 7 blusniper;bind 8 blusniper2;bind 9 bluoffclass_pyro;"

bind F1 "exec cast_9v9.cfg"
bind SHIFT "+campick"
bind 1 "spec_player_cc 2 5"
bind 2 "spec_player_cc 2 4"
bind 3 "spec_player_cc 2 3"
bind 4 "spec_player_cc 2 3 1"
bind 5 "spec_player_cc 2 1"
bind 6 "spec_player_cc 2 1 1"
bind 7 "spec_player_cc 2 2"
bind 8 "spec_player_cc 2 2 1"
bind 9 "redoffclass_pyro"

Explanation:
1=medic
2=demo
3=soldier 1
4=soldier 2
5=scout 1
6=scout 2
7=sniper 1
8=sniper 2
9=off-class cycle
Holding shift selects RED players. The off-class cycle key is the most complex part of this script; it cycles through pyro, heavy, engie and spy and then back to pyro, and works with the shift toggle. F1 changes to 9v9 mode.

This goes in cast_9v9.cfg:

alias redscout "spec_player_cc 2 1;"
alias redsoldier "spec_player_cc 2 3"
alias redpyro "spec_player_cc 2 7"
alias reddemo "spec_player_cc 2 4"
alias redheavy "spec_player_cc 2 6"
alias redengie "spec_player_cc 2 9"
alias redmedic "spec_player_cc 2 5"
alias redsniper "spec_player_cc 2 2"
alias redspy "spec_player_cc 2 8"
alias bluscout "spec_player_cc 3 1"
alias blusoldier "spec_player_cc 3 3"
alias blupyro "spec_player_cc 3 7"
alias bludemo "spec_player_cc 3 4"
alias bluheavy "spec_player_cc 3 6"
alias bluengie "spec_player_cc 3 9"
alias blumedic "spec_player_cc 3 5"
alias blusniper "spec_player_cc 3 2"
alias bluspy "spec_player_cc 3 8"
alias +campick "bind 1 redscout;bind 2 redsoldier;bind 3 redpyro;bind 4 reddemo;bind 5 redheavy;bind 6 redengie;bind 7 redmedic;bind 8 redsniper;bind 9 redspy;"
alias -campick "bind 1 bluscout;bind 2 blusoldier;bind 3 blupyro;bind 4 bludemo;bind 5 bluheavy;bind 6 bluengie;bind 7 blumedic;bind 8 blusniper;bind 9 bluspy;"

bind F1 "exec cast_6v6"
bind SHIFT +campick
bind 1 "spec_player_cc 2 1"
bind 2 "spec_player_cc 2 3"
bind 3 "spec_player_cc 2 7"
bind 4 "spec_player_cc 2 4"
bind 5 "spec_player_cc 2 6"
bind 6 "spec_player_cc 2 9"
bind 7 "spec_player_cc 2 5"
bind 8 "spec_player_cc 2 2"
bind 9 "spec_player_cc 2 8"

Explanation: 1 through 9 selects the class from scout to spy (backpack order). Holding shift selects RED players. F1 changes to 6v6 mode.

To do:
- single key cycle between soldiers, scouts and snipers in 6v6
- add keypad option
- add mouse scroll cycle option

Enjoy!

Arr too good