i've been spending the last couple days digging thru tf2 pure code and just getting angrier and angrier at how incompetent valve is in regards to sv pure AND my lack of ability to fix it from a sourcemod / server side because srcds doesn't expose ANYTHING i can find that will let me flush a client's soundemitter system, outside of loading a map_sounds_txt override file which has to be downloaded to the client, which personally doesn't seem like a workable solution.

dude.
even the laziest hacky fix that would take literally ONE FUCKING LINE OF CODE would be flushing the client's soundemitter system after L969 here: https://github.com/lua9520/source-engine-2018-hl2_src/tree/master/soundemittersystem/soundemittersystembase.cpp#L967-L969

it's gotta be mentioned that for some god damn reason AddSoundsFromFile there is taking the file it was just told to reload as an input to readd to the soundsystem? what the fuck dude!

of course, actually fixing sv pure to work would be a better solution than just adding a hack kludge fix. maybe even make it not wholly client authoritative!

then again, that's too much to expect from a company like valve innit????

from what i can tell, they wholesale just ripped out the "check crc hashes" part of sv pure (deprecating sv_pure_trace, sv_pure_retiretime, and sv_pure_consensus), but they just ... never bothered to set up anything else like it? at all? when you connect to a tf2 server from what I can tell the server just politely asks you to copy its sv pure whitelist to your local whitelist in memory and not mess with it at all which is HILARIOUSLY easy to bypass for cheats and trivially easy EVEN IF YOU'RE NOT CHEATING by just fucking fiddling with directories and/or preloading because the pure code wasnt updated to properly check for the custom folder's existence (at least that's what i can gather). ugh dude just fucking give this game to another studio already it's just fucking embarrassing

Here's a preview of changes coming to soap:

Completely reworked the spawn system. Nothing will change for players, but soap's spawn system is currently... massively hacked together, and a complete fucking disaster.

The spawn system as it currently stands makes a copy of the spawn config 65 times * 2 (one for red spawns, one for blu spawns) on map load, and then iterates thru those copies the same amount of times as their are players on the server to make a new temporary copy of the spawns, and then grabs a random spawn from this new local copy, deletes the local copy, traces a box to the position it finds, and checks for collision with players, and if there are none, spawns the player there.

This is hilariously wasteful, not to mention the fact that it's using the wrong functions to grab and store data, which made it incredibly difficult to know wtf was actually going on.

Especially because basically none of it was commented.

I tore most of that shit out. It currently now just creates a single spawn handle for each team, grabs each spawn and pushes it to the end of the spawn array, and grabs a random index of a random spawn for the client's team. Then, it does the same box tracing test, but I've added sanity checks so that 1) players can't spawn outside the world and 2) players can't spawn clipping into the world. If SOAP finds either of these scenarios, it will delete that spawn from the spawn list it has and never try to spawn another player there again for that map, and will throw errors in console about it.

These improvements have also allowed me to add a new feature: soap_debugspawns.

Set this cvar to 1 to show a green box in the tracebox around a player's spawn whenever soap spawns them -

https://i.imgur.com/ZvrCUS7.jpg

Set this cvar to 2 to show team colored boxes around all spawns on the map -

https://i.imgur.com/1uc9mPs.jpg

They will be pink if a spawn is shared between both teams -

https://i.imgur.com/G7yth9v.jpg

Soap will also yell at you in chat about bad spawns if you have them, like this one I made to test this -

https://i.imgur.com/hgUYJJq.jpg

I also added soap_novelocityonspawn (defaults to 1), to prevent players from retaining their velocity from their previous lives when being teleported by SOAP.

I plan on adding twiikuu's suggestion, soap_loadspawns (or a similarly named command, eg sm_soap_loadmap etc), to allow server owners to load soap using an older version of a map's configs on newer versions of maps without configs for them yet.

Stay tuned!

-steph

Yeah, I've reworked it several times since then, it used to be based on shitty SMAC logic. It detects only on players who have "spikes" (e.g. snaps) in their viewangle delta (changes) surrounded on both sides by negligible angle changes - see logic here: https://github.com/sapphonie/StAC-tf2/blob/c6b6ec48847463360cca2b768561ba08c2745b84/scripting/stac/stac_onplayerruncmd.sp#L708

Honestly, the logic for turnbinds has remained basically unchanged in the plugin since 2019, when I was making StAC as a plugin to be run on all RGL servers, because RGL has a rule against it. It currently has no checks for yawspeed or anything else, but that could definitely be implemented, because I agree that there's no reason to blanket ban all turn inputs - which is why it's defaulted to never even check for them unless explicitly set with the cvar.

Technically yes, in regards to usercmd differences, but practically no. StAC has a check for spinbotting, but it (almost) never detects on legit players (unless they're using weird gamepads/stylus touchpads etc) because it only checks for exact repeated angle differences. I'm not exactly sure how to fix or check for that outside of kicking people with ultra high sens, but then you could just turn your dpi up to a million and do the same thing.

Naw. I've tuned it over months to ignore laggy players - take a look here and here if you want to see how specifically it does this.

TLDR, checks clients to make sure they're not repeating usercmds or sending them out of order, and that alone filters out 99% of ppl with shitty internet. checks if any angles are 0.0, and checks approximate client command rate after that, just in case.

StAC has been finally publicly released with version 5.0. Check it out here:

https://forums.alliedmods.net/showthread.php?t=332794
https://github.com/sapphonie/StAC-tf2
https://www.reddit.com/r/tf2/comments/nq61u0/stephs_anticheat_50_public_release/

mgemod update -> 3.0.0 https://github.com/sapphonie/MGEMod

https://github.com/sapphonie/MGEMod/pull/7

Changelog

- Merged Pepperkick's ChillyMGE into MGEMod. Pepperkick has push access to the new repo as well, and big thanks to him for letting me merge it. The new plugin is just named "mge.smx", to distinguish it from mgemod and chillymge. It should work on any server running any modern mge map. You will have to delete mgemod.smx
- Updated translation files to reflect the above change (MGEMod -> MGE)
- Added Chillypunch maps to mgemod_spawns.cfg
I DID NOT EDIT THE MGE_TRAINING SPAWN FILE. You will __not be able to use !2v2 on MGE Training__ (at least for the moment).
- Rewrote a lot of the plugin to use more modern sourcepawn syntax / conventions
- Removed a lot of crusty unused and unneeded things - including mgemod_spawns_2v2 and mgemod_stats
- Hopefully fixed issue with getting frozen in spec on server join occasionally, related to ds_enable <= 2, by setting client team to spectate instead of unassigned immediately upon join

As always, please report bugs here -> https://github.com/sapphonie/MGEMod/issues

Thank you to dog and elektro for beta testing.

yeah

https://www.teamfortress.tv/post/1009710/remove-iron-bomber-from-whitelist

(they also made a fix for the wrap assasin / bison / other projectiles breaking:

https://forums.alliedmods.net/showthread.php?p=2706629)

why not just go full promod when theres plugins that can fix most engine issues with the game lol

wait why doesnt rgl just prevent ppl from joining spectator team theres literally a cvar for it - mp_allowspectators

lol this is because the repo isn't updated with the correct spawn file. doing a pr now

will look into this

lol i used metal footsteps when i was an rgl anticheat admin, fought to get it changed, was ignored, never got banned.

this is dumb and wholly unenforceable. do better, rgl.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xcr7Xc4n3Rw&feature=youtu.be

try it out here: https://github.com/sapphonie/tf2-no-pistol-spread

https://i.imgur.com/QhqMkuL.png

rgl is actively hemorrhaging admins and volunteers who give a shit, and they double down on playing nanny instead of doing anything meaningful to advance tf2? color me surprised! of course people shouldn't be allowed to sling hate & bigotry, but god fuckin damn, context matters.

spaceship servers runs one 200 tick mge oihguv server and one 500 tick dm server just for funsies, and while they do feel better to play on, there's not really a point for them. they're resource intensive and buggy. if mastercomms ever got stuff merged upstream to improve srcds performance and fix obnoxious bugs involving high tickrate - like players sticking to walls and bouncy pipes etc - i could definitely see higher tickrate servers becoming the norm, because there IS noticable hitreg improvement, especially on hitscan / melee... but i'm not really holding my breath.