Thread: How to populate your server faster

So some of y'all might know me. Been playing a ton of L4D2 with the TPG community and love it.

Picking up TF2 again, and as expected the team play on the server was phenomenal. So naturally I tried to bring a few online friends onto the server to prime it tonight.

What happened? Well, like 5 minutes of downloading mp3 files happened. And I had to convince them to stick it out. So for what its worth coming from someone new to the community, I think you could have a much more populated TF2 server if you got rid of the amount of stuff that downloads when someone joins. If I have to talk people I know into sticking out the download, its doubtful many random players will have the patience for it.

2 cents.

Oh, and even though I had played on the server the night before, there was still like 5 minutes of file downloads.

Disable custom sound download. MANY people have it, they just don't like it.

As much as I like the songs, I know it's a long wait, but meh.

Good note Trapper. I'll have to take a look at the songs and see if we can prune some of them. Good news is you only have to download them once.

Originally Posted by enf

Good note Trapper. I'll have to take a look at the songs and see if we can prune some of them. Good news is you only have to download them once.

I must be doing something wrong then, as it seems every other time I join TF2 or CSS I have to redownload them.

Yeah, not sure if its useful info or not, but I downloaded them last night, then again tonight. But when I left the server and rejoined not 5 mins later it didnt download again. I don't know what server side DL options there are, but it almost sounds like it downloaded to a temp cache folder.

I have to redownload them whenever I join too. :P In TF2 only, not CSS.

I think its actually client side, because I have yet to redownload them for any server (TF2 or CSS) and have not had any complaints from regs about it.

It's a cvar, cl_allowdownload or something as such.

I've never had to re-download all of them but I'll often get one song that corrupts or something so it attempts to download it every time I join and it tries for almost a minute and then times out. I just copied another file and renamed it as the bad one. So when an admin plays Sabotage I get...something different.

Originally Posted by Graverunner

I've never had to re-download all of them but I'll often get one song that corrupts or something so it attempts to download it every time I join and it tries for almost a minute and then times out. I just copied another file and renamed it as the bad one. So when an admin plays Sabotage I get...something different.

This is most likely related to the mp3 filename not matching the admin cfg filename. I'll look into it.