New patch, big deal. There’s been three new hats added, which are made out of more hats. Variants for the propaganda contest winners have also been added. They’re just the hats I mentioned, only with a small badge added on it.

The thing that baffles me is that now stickies can’t be shot out of the air. From what I’ve seen this mostly happens against a heavy, but why deprive him of a rare, short burst of glory against a class that already gives him enough trouble?

Talking about scootlegs is fun and all, Valve, but where’s our cvar that re-enables it?

 

Oh, and if you’re wondering why people die when they’re not on the tele, you have to think of the bounding boxes the source engine uses for players. Imagine each player uses a box that determines how he’ll collide with other players. If you teleport in near someone, and those boxes collide, he dies. There originally was going to be a part detailing that but I got lazy and skipped it.

On a related note, SFM is pretty awesome.

Note: Yes, teleporting does kill an uber. Note the demoman’s uber didn’t wear off, and the medic is ragdolled, meaning he too was ubered at the moment he got warped in on.

Community Fortress has an interview featuring none other than our favorite dev Robin Walker. Some tasty info is leaked, such as an upcoming optional lobby system for competitive TF2, tweaks to the item drop system to prevent or hamper idling, and others.

He’s the co-founder and head of one of the most influential game developers of all time and now Valve’s Gabe Newell is being honored for his many achievements. The Game Developers Choices Awards have announced that Newell will be the 2010 recipient of their Pioneer Award.

Newell, who becomes the third winner of the Pioneer Award, is being honored not just for his achievements in game development with the Half-Life series, the Left 4 Dead series and more but also with Valve’s creation of the Steam download service. He will receive the Pioneer Award at ceremonies at the the Game Developers Conference on March 11.

Good for him! He and everyone at Valve deserved it. Now maybe this will be a big incentive for Valve to say something about Episode 3. I believe congratulatory e-mails are in order.

Over the past few days I’ve worked on the backend of the mod vault and other areas of the site, so we’ve had a bit of a pause in updates. That, and all of our editors decided to take an unannounced vacation.

Anyway, a new TF2 patch is out, and the TF2 blog got updated too with an interesting new section that allows you to submit avatars and custom weapons.

They’ve messed about with the dead ringer, making the fake deaths more convincing, but what’s still baffling is that a spy that feigns his death still gives a head to an eyelander wielding demoman. It seems Valve has some work to do on their priorities, as the gunboat and equalizer taunt combo sadly doesn’t work anymore. It’s quite a nerf to people who enjoyed that bug, and I’m certain I haven’t seen droves of steel-toed soldiers grenading themselves to the top of the scoreboard. Well, all in all there’s a ton of small changes to talk about, so I’m not going to go on on this subject. Rest in peace, scootlegs.

Also, feel free to spread my formspring around.

 
No doubt some of the best frame by frame animation I’ve seen these last few months.
 

I’m going to release a new simple mod for the Direct Hit, as the sound was annoying me, and it just didn’t feel right.

The real reason why this post is up, however, is the debut of the new mod vault. There you can find pretty much every mod that I’ve released on the net.

We’ve already seen the voice actors of the Heavy and Demo, and Louis, so here’s the Scout’s VA, Nathan Vetterlein:

 

Sadly he only sounds like the scout in the above video, a bit underwhelming.