http://www.welchs.com/images/default-source/Product/food-and-snacks/individual-product-pages/foodsnacks_fruitsnacks_500x356.png?sfvrsn=2

True, but the relative size of a TF2 hitbox also seems to be larger. Either way, it suffices to say that an LG will be different than a pistol and will have to be balanced accordingly. Arguing about the balance of something that doesn't exist is kind of pointless in my opinion.

The problem with having an LG in TF2 is that TF2 isn't Quake. People move more so much more slowly that getting 90+ LG would be pretty easy against anything, possibly excluding scouts. Thus, it would have to do pretty poor damage, making it as disappointing as the Classic in terms of usability.

However, I have come to a conclusion about how a pistol/smg or similar spread-based automatic weapon can be made RNG-free. Shotguns, with nospread on, have no RNG, despite modelling a spread. Applying the same logic to the pistol doesn't work, however; you get a LG, which significantly changes the weapon. In order to balance this, you must account for the spread factor, and how it becomes more significant as distance increases.

http://puu.sh/g10Xn/eb88126e2c.png

This method deals with both the RNG, and prevents the pistol's usage from changing (other than making it consistent). Each time the player fires, a cone is drawn from the fire point of the player with a slope equal to the 'accuracy' of the weapon. For the first player it hits, the ratio of the cross sectional area inside the enemy's hitbox to the area outside of their hitbox is used to determine how much damage the shot does (as well as a falloff equation for distance). The point at which the cross section is taken could have an effect on the damage done, so I arbitrarily decided to use the midpoint with respect to the cone's vertex and the point which the player is aiming at.

http://puu.sh/g11t8/3272b4e3f9.png

Shotguns could be done in this way as well. This would alleviate the need to occasionally aim at the far side of an enemy so as to get one of the side columns of shots to hit as well. In the picture below, aiming at the center of the target now results in the yellow tracer, 3 hits. Aiming to the far side results in the red tracer, 6. Due to all hitboxes in TF2 being convex (read: all rectangular prisms), this will always make aiming for the center the most effective strategy (though in some cases not necessary - at some ranges either the entire cone will be inside of the hitbox, or the entire hitbox will be inside the cone without aiming for the perfect center).

http://puu.sh/g11Tr/bc0575b11f.png

Implementation will probably never happen, as it requires making an entire new hit detection method, is significantly more resource-intensive (though that hasn't stopped Valve before), and collision with walls and such would be fairly odd (though it could be treated like the Bison, having a very small collision box despite having a large hitbox). Alternatively, if modelling the pistol/smg as it is now is not the goal, a low damage, high fire rate shotgun would be equally RNG-free.

Medigun that can heal two targets at once, with normal heal/overheal, but with no uber. Not sure how it would balance, but the ability to trade initiation for a constant heal advantage would be interesting.

Found some interesting (cheat-protected) convars:

"hud_damagemeter" = "1" ( def. "0" ) client
 cheat
 - Display damage-per-second information in the lower right corner of the screen.

"hud_damagemeter_ooctimer" = "1"
 client
 - How many seconds after the last damage event before we consider the player out of combat.

"hud_damagemeter_period" = "0" client
 - When set to zero, average damage-per-second across all recent damage events, otherwise average damage across defined period (number of seconds).

http://puu.sh/fNIoj/aa4d511955.png (bottom right)
http://puu.sh/fNIsb/b6d9cd656c.png (after 1 second)

It shows your DPS as calculated over the last hud_damagemeter_period seconds. Not especially useful as of now.

Imply is used in the logical sense in the phrase, not as casually used; eg. if P implies Q, ~Q implies ~P.

double

Correlation doesn't imply causation.

Pugna used to have admins who would send an announcement from the steam group around the normal pugging time. In the months before the death of pugna, Mythikal/mpb/Fog stopped doing so, resulting in less games starting. Switching irc servers wasn't beneficial. Also, the season in which many teams played both ESEA and CEVO coincided with pugna losing most of its userbase.

The issue with pugna/mix wasn't the irc format. Even if you successfully argue that irc is too complicated to use (which is absolutely moronic, it's a chat box), there is already a large playerbase which has already used pugna/mix in their years of service, and thus have already overcome this immense barrier. As of now, there are still (after 2-3 months of no pugs) 21 people idling in pugna. If the bot/servers were to be restarted, new admins chosen (for the old group, as it has >1000 members), and some kind of larger announcement on the forums made, I see no reason why it couldn't be restored to what it was a year ago.

If it's absolutely necessary to make a more user-friendly interface, we could do what Twitch chat does. Make a web client or executable (like Dango's) which displays IRC chat, but masks all of the commands behind pretty pictures and has a more visual interface for actions such as adding, captaining, etc. This would allow users to interact with a nice Center-like interface or with a normal IRC client.

Ultimately, IRC pugs are just momentum-driven. If people know that they're happening, they will work better than inhouses in terms of both consistency and how inclusive they are. After the series of events described above, the momentum is gone, and they die until they are restarted forcefully.

Likely m_rawinput 1, though it is preferred for a few reasons.

Additionally, this turns off mouse accel (m_mouseaccel 0)

I played on the notorious Dallas 99 last night, 11/12 players had sub-80 ping and no issues. Admittedly, the 12th had 200 constant, but it's better than the 140 average I've seen previously.

I had entirely forgotten about signing drivers, thanks. This thread, however, confirms my belief that I need to modify i8042prt, rather than writing a new filter driver. Sadly, all of the links to prebuilt drivers are down, and the diff file from here doesn't actually correspond to the source for i8042prt that I found.

Good point, I had tried asking on a few StackExchange sites though. I entirely forgot about the MSDN forums.

So, recently I bought an IBM terminal keyboard. Knowing that the general consensus is that these cannot be made to work with Windows (barring a microcontroller), I thought this would be a fun project.

So far, I have cleaned the board up, made an adapter from the proprietary 240-degree 5-pin DIN adapter to PS/2, and successfully gotten characters to print out under Windows. Many of the scancodes sent by the keyboard did not map correctly to their keycaps (or in some cases the functions on the keycaps did not exist anymore!), so I used a registry entry documented here as well as information on the scancodes sent by the keyboard here (second diagram), and a list of actual scancodes found here. This has so far resulted in this registry entry (the <>, and grey block above the arrow keys have yet to be remapped).

So far, so good. However, at this point I noticed some oddities with respect to the function of the numlock and scroll lock keys (but not capslock), as well as numerous issues with attempting to use the keyboard in any games. Using this program, I deduced that the keyboard is not sending keyup scancodes. This thread states that a filter driver is needed to call IOCTL_INTERNAL_I8042_KEYBOARD_WRITE_BUFFER to send commands to the keyboard, which can be used to make the keyboard send keydown and keyup scancodes (possibly without repeating, but that may not be an issue).

I, however, have absolutely no clue where to begin with writing a driver. If anyone could offer some expertise on the matter, I would be quite grateful.

tl;dr, does anyone know how to write a Windows 7 filter driver?

I definitely like the reversions; the visual style seems much more fitting now. I'd still like a +frag option, but that's purely aesthetic.