Turn down your speakers while you’re talking:

Are people sick of hearing your game sounds through your speakers while you talk, add this to your autoexec.cfg
alias +newvoice "volume 0.5;+voicerecord"
alias -newvoice "volume 1;-voicerecord"
bind "shift" +newvoice

Change shift to whatever it is that you have bound your voice key too. This should turn your game sounds down by half whenever you go to talk.

Fixing graphical issues from alt-tab. AND PINK SQUARES.

Now this is more than likely more common knowledge than I’d like to admit, but I never knew how to get rid of the pink squares, other than restarting the game. This script should fix both invisible people and pink squares, but keep in mind it might take a bit longer than just fixing invisible people. Stick this in your autoexec.cfg and smoke it.

alias +fixpinksquares "mat_specular 0; record fix; stop; hud_reloadscheme"
alias -fixpinksquares "mat_specular 1"
bind "PGUP" "+fixpinksquares"

Obviously this is bound to page up, but you can bind it to whatever you like.

Destroying a sapper script:

You can destroy a sapper that you’ve put on an engy’s building. With this script. Put it in spy.cfg.

bind "DEL" "destroy 4"

Have fun.

Don’t really want to take the FPS drop, but can’t be bothered disabling aero whenever you play?

Now you can automatically have Aero disable whenever you start playing TF2.

Windows automatically disables Aero when running fullscreen applications, but not for windowed applications.

VISTA: To manually instruct windows to disable Aero when running hl2.exe (even in windowed mode), go to C:\Program Files\Steam\steamapps\youraccount\team fortress 2 > right click hl2.exe > properties > compatibility tab > disable desktop composition.

WINDOWS 7: Find the hl2.exe, right click and go to Troubleshoot Compatibility -> Troubleshoot program. Check “The program opens but doesn’t display correctly” and hit Next. Check “Window transparency isn’t displayed properly.” Windows 7 should disable aero, and you can test run tf2.

Alternatively, if either of these doesn’t work for you for some reason, you can set up shortcuts to click on to enable and disable aero.

(I’ll a little about how to do this once I’m back on my Windows computer, I can’t think of it off the top of my head, but here are the commands)

C:\Windows\System32\sc.exe start uxsms

C:\Windows\System32\sc.exe stop uxsms

Enjoy the FPS boost.

Ideas.

But enough small talk, here are the HUD’s:

PVHud – What I use:

Now has an installer, which does all the thinking for you and will update itself if you run the installer after a patch. I suggest you try it out. http://pvhud.drok-radnik.com/.

Before you complain about the lack of 32 player HUD, just find scoreboard.res and replace it with this file (thanks to craziplaya21):

http://www.filepak.com/3/2_ScoreBoard.zip

Real players don’t play 32 slot servers, but who am I to judge.

Flame’s HUD – A popular competitive HUD

A lot of people seem to use Flame’s HUD as well. I’ve tried it out before and it’s a very polished, nice looking HUD. I just liked PVHud better, what can I say.

Find it here: http://code.google.com/p/flamehud/

Community TF2 HUD – A little of column a, a little of column b

I know what you were thinking to yourself. What if I want something that looks like a mix between PVHud and Flames. Well. Firstly, shut up.

Secondly, here it is: http://code.google.com/p/communitytf2hud/

I haven’t personally used this yet, but I’m sure it’s amazing. I’ve been informed that switching between minmode 0 and minmode 1 switches between the two HUD’s essentially.

Oxide’s HUD – Newcomer

Another HUD that I haven’t used, but I’m sure is amazing. Oxide’s HUD provides a really minimalistic HUD, clean and functional. Reminiscent of Seeker’s old HUD.

Download here: http://colinb.hostnamez.net/ben/

m0re’s HUD – Old Gold

m0re’s HUD was always a favourite in the community and now that he’s back, although I haven’t used it yet, it will certainly be another contender.

Find it here: http://m0re.nocrits.com/index.php?site=files&cat=3

Your HUD is all about what you like. I can guarantee some of these HUD’s have more added functionality than the default. But you play with what you’re comfortable with.

Read this series, it’ll make you a better player.

If not it’ll just give you something to think about.

Link: http://www.ubercharged.net/author/echelonthree/

It’s a good read.

Turns out, you can also make the backgrounds transparent.

First off I’ll explain to you how to do it, then I’ll show you what it all means.

• First up, just like last time, open your steamscheme.res, located at steam\resource\steamscheme.res
• Find the line (around line 48) that says “DarkClayBG” “47 49 45 255″ // shadow
• Make a copy of that line and change it to “DarkClayBGTrans” “47 49 45 160″
• Find the ToolTipBorder section, around line 2935.

ToolTipBorder
{
“corner_rounding” “2″
render_bg
{
“1″        ”fill( x0, y0, x1, y1, DarkClayBG )”

• Change the part that says DarkClayBG to DarkClayBGTrans
• Save the file, start up TF2, and all your notifications should be slightly transparent.

Now to explain what this all means.

Basically the colours at the start are set out in the format, “Name” “Red Green Blue Alpha” (values), but for ease of reference I’ll be using  “DarkClayBG” “47 49 45 255″ as my reference point from now on.

DarkClayBG is giving a name to the set of values to the right of it, so that rather than writing all the values through out the code, they are just able to substitute the name of the colour in.

The “47 49 45 255″ refers to the RGB and Alpha values of the colour.

These values will give you this colour:

So in theory if you wish to make the colour redder, just increase the number of the 47, in the picture below, i’ve increased the red value to 100, so the code would look like this. “DarkClayBG” “100 49 45 255″ and this is what it would look like:

But the alpha is the interesting one. It is graded on a scaled of 0 to 225 of how opaque or transparent it is, 255 being solid, 0 being fully see through.

So by doing what I’m suggesting with “DarkClayBGTrans” “47 49 45 160″, you are essentially naming a new colour “DarkClayBGTrans” (you could name it whatever you wanted but it’ll stay this for simplicity sake), and you are turning down the alpha value, which makes the window more see-through.

I can’t really visually illustrate the point here, as I still don’t have steam available to take screen shots (DAMN EXAMS), but if I ask my friend nicely he might just do it for me, so watch this space.

Now strongly urge you not to mess with the original values there, rather, define your own colour and change the specific elements that you want changed, as there are alot of the steam scheme elements based off the default colours and just changing them would change a whole lot of your layout. ie. Don’t come crying to me when half your windows are transparent and red. I’ve given you fair warning.

I guess the whole point of me saying this was, if you want to change the colours or the transparency to your liking, just mess with the values. Just looking through now it is quite easy to make the text on the notification see-through, along with the background.

But you can figure that one out for yourself.

I’m not sure about you, but having the steam popups in the bottom right has always annoyed me, as it seems to be the most used bit of real estate on my screen when out of game. It’ll always cover something and I either have to click it then close the window, or just wait for it to go away and hope another doesn’t pop up in its place.

But now I’ve just found out you can actually move the little suckers to where you want them, as well as many other useful little tweaks.

These dandy little options can be found under in your Steam\resource file in the steamscheme.res

Just hit ctrl+f and find Notifications, you will immediately come to these options.

Notifications.PanelPosition            ”BottomRight”

// Can be “BottomRight”, “BottomLeft”, “TopRight”, “TopLeft”

­
Notifications.SlideDirection            ”Vertical”

// Can be “Vertical”, “Horizontal”, “None” and controls slide effect

­
Notifications.FadeInTime            ”0.55″

// Controls the time it takes to slide/fade into view

­

Notifications.FadeOutTime            ”0.55″

// Controls the time it takes to slide/fade out of view

­

Notifications.DisplayTime            ”6.0″

// Controls the length of time at steady state after fade in and before fade out

­

Notifications.StackSize                ”3″

// Controls how many panels we will stack before background queuing

All pretty self explanatory, edit them to your liking, I personally just turned the fadein and fade out times down and increased my stack size, and moved the damn notifications to the bottom left.

Getting sick of the HUD that pops up saying who kills you and with what weapon and points out bits of you?

Just want a blank screen when you die?

http://www.filepak.com/upload/8_Remove Killcam HUD.zip

Download that file and put all 3 .res files into the “team fortress 2\tf\resource\ui\” folder.

Great for making screen shots without any thing getting in the way of your epic photo.

Original Thread: http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3186461

(There’s alot of other interesting stuff in that thread)

Post some HUDless screen shots in the comments when you’ve tried it out.

Jealous?

Want it?

http://altpluzf4.is1337.net/colorname.html

Use this to generate a code.

For what I got above i typed into the generator “^5fc.^6The Ned”, which gave me the output “fc.The Ned”

Then use the console command “setinfo name” to set your name, so i would have copied the generated name, and in console typed “setinfo name fc.The Ned”

Originally pointed out to me by AltPluzF4.

Thread: http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=987368

Enjoy.

I know this isn’t really much of a problem for anyone, but sometimes its just nice to have little advantages.

If you open up your nVidia control panel (it’s in control panel), and click on the Adjust Desktop Color Settings, under the display sub menu, it’ll come up with this screen.

Default

Now I don’t have TF2 installed at the moment (exams), so I only had a brief moment to jump on a friends computer to mess with the colour settings, and as far as I could tell from what I did very quickly, something along these lines would be an improvement.

I personally recommend hopping into a pub server in a windowed TF2 game (-window in launch options), or even a real match, and testing out what works best for you.

Just figured i’d bring this to your attention, you can figure out your own settings.

Don’t forget to turn it off after you’ve done playing TF2, otherwise it might make pictures and your general desktop look a bit weird.