Dan Brown Does a TF2 Update

One thing I think my Team Fortress 2 team does well is respond to game updates as these are both regular and manually applied on the server-side yet automatic on the client-side leading to cases where players can’t connect to a non-updated server.

I logged into remote desktop to apply the update, jumped into team chat to announce its impending arrival and checked the server mailing list to see if there were any documented issues and all registered clear.  I applied the update to a test server and every time some joined the server crashed.  Great.  I unloaded all the SourceMod plugins and it still crashed but didn’t if SourceMod was removed, so SourceMod was the problem.  One might say “ok, go without SourceMod” but to me that’s the equivalent of “Windows has been updated and it works great, except you can’t install any applicants or customize it.”

I hit up a friend who was a SourceMod developer as to what to do and he replied “if you had been in the SourceMod IRC your server would be up by now”.  And thus began the Da Vinci code bullshit that would mark my attempt to update.  So, I jump into the IRC channel for SourceMod and whenever someone was asked what to do to fix the update the reply was only “4836-4839”.  This didn’t correlate to a forum post, a development snapshot, a phone number nor a URL but the number of the ticket in the version repository that contained the changes that needed to be made to a text file to get things to work which was listed entirely in the “+/-” format that repositories use.

I don’t think I’m a noob when it comes to this stuff and have been doing updates of one sort or another for almost 3 years, but this whole run around struck me as an attempt to remind the user how sharp the developer was.  If it happens again, I’m going to suspend my recurring monthly donation to SourceMod for 30 days for each 5 minutes it takes for me to get an answer.  Both sides have bullets in their magazines.