SourceSTUFF â„–4 | December 2015
House â„–1337 Learning about the most interesting people from the SFM_RU group
Passing 2015 with TF2 Results of the 2015 year in one article
New Year Craziness Celebrating the New Year with BLU and RED
Once upon in a red kingdom... KrasniyB talking about his SFM works
Content
49 3 Poster Reviews By Sofka Ketamine
9 Population Census Don’t forget to click on windows
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11 News Speaking about VK group 13 Interview KrasniyB and his red kingdom 23 Patrick’s Documents Second Part 30 Team Fortress 2 Farewell 2015 45 SFM for newbies Answers for common questions
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Sections PhotoGallery Dota 2 News Art Gallery Letters to Editors
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SourceSTUFF Editor-in-Chief Evil Witch Deputy-Editors Victory, Enigmus Proof-Readers 小loudy, Void, Traitor Freak, MysticTheMeeM Illustrator p0nystark Correspondent Darthbodan Authors Sofka Ketamine, Patrick Hunt, Arrr! Translators OPyshkin, BRBS, Nessy Cyrodiil, Porontobello, Black Harrier, Chiara, SchizoFrankie,
Special thanks to: Facepunch, SPUF, SFM_RU, Alexander Cherepanov, DillyDong, Delfy.
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Poster reviews Author: Sofka Ketamine
Dragonblood Kuzmin
The 1st picture that we`ll review is made by Dragonblood Kuzmin. Here u can see something reminding a zeppelin that contains boat and an airship at the same time, leading its way to the lighthouse. The weather is awful. It’s stormy. There are lots of lightnings and also u can hear the thunder (just switch on your imagination!). This work is a fine combination of Photoshop and SFM (there are lots of discussions about that thing). How can we say that the poster is bad, especially with these huge thunderous clouds? We think that the author has created a brilliant picture mixing Photoshop and our favorite SFM. But this wonderful picture also has its disadvantages. The trees are 3
painted too brightly, which shows up and distracts us from the details that should be important. Also, the lightning doesn’t illuminate the clouds. As a result, the work doesn’t look as realistic as it supposed to be. But in general, the poster is done quite well. So, let’s go further…
Ivan Nekhoroshkov
And now we can see a “typical” Russian (Sokol from Payday 2), riding a home bear carrying lots of various equipment. This poster is made by Ivan Nechoroshkov. And we can’t miss wonderful and wellbalanced details within the work, portrays a beautifully realistic, frosty Russian winter landscape. There are exciting flowing sky colours with light clouds far away. Also, pine trees are looking pleasant among the rowan-trees and firs, near the hero. Although, the bear’s muzzle is hard-to see, as the bear is too dark.
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Evil Witch
And the last of Russian done work, is produced by Evil Witch. Mori Motonari from “Sengoku Basara” is running to destroy the enemy’s ships to protect his own fleet. There are the aliens’ ships on the picture’s background with the chips of destroyed ships on the foreground. The pretty sunset in addition to the calmly flowing clouds makes the poster beautiful. This poster was made in Photoshop that`s one the main part of authors work. We mark on the poster the lighting, waves, spatters, contrast, developed shadows and the background itself. Due to using Photoshop, this poster comes out so much better. However, because Photoshop was used, some people are indifferent about the poster as they say that the author’s use of Photoshop was too much. But we think that it’s not so important. There’s no need to mark that only. But the poster is designed around a theme, which could 5
pass over people who haven’t seen the anime this poster is based on. That’s one of the main disadvantages that the picture has.
Pindakees
Well, let’s move to our foreign colleagues. On the poster that`s made by Pindakees, we can see two “The Wild Hunt” heroes from Sapkowski’s “The Witcher”. Some details, such as sparks of fire, the mystery of the heroes looks and perfect background. Due to these details, the picture became quite interesting. However, the technical component wasn’t made so good. It’s quite hard to say what pose the heroes have and how they manage to do it. Also, the girl’s hair is too angular, what makes it look very unrealistic. As for the fire, it looks pale, and we don’t actually know doest it have any special effect or not. Well, in general we can still say that this artwork is pretty good.
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Clockwork BeastSFM
The next poster is created by Clockwork BeastSFM. This poster is quite unique, as the underwater location. There are lots of underwater plants, local habitants, stones and remains of some ancient civilization. The author has strived to use the entire canvas,inserting something into every nook and cranny. First, we can see the alligator’s chaps, then the reptile and finally the underwater world takes our gaze. Unfortunately, there is a big mistake in the work. The water. It’s so clear that we can’t even see any difference between the earth and the water itself. There isn’t any distortion, which we usually get from being underwater. It could be easily corrected with the “fog_ override” command or with our favourite programm, Photoshop.
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Craxytavi
The author of the last work for today is Craxytavi. He managed to mix Overwatch and Team Fortress 2, which are very similar to each other. Tracer (from Overwatch) is running from the team from TF2. Bullets are everywhere, urine is winging, and grenades are detonating. And Tracer dodges all obstacles whilst still maintaining a smile. Also, we marked scout, who clearly would rather chat up his competitor. In the background, there is a nice contrast between the clouds on the blue sky. The work is done simply. On one side it’s called laconic. However, this takes away from the poster’s rating. The detonations and grass look a bit ugly. That makes the viewers sad. But we don’t pay attention to that. We enjoy a great performance of the faces within the scene.
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Population census
Every window belongs to one person.
Vincent S. Tom
zombiller
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You’ll get to window owner’s apartment by pressing on the window DP films
GLS Machinima
FLOOPtRON
KrasniyB
Patrick Hunt
Keller Max
BOLT
Appearence of the first theme week
Announcement of “Coub-festival”
First “Art-Challenge”
15 march
31 march
27 june
Meanwhile, the number of participants in the group for the year increased by 2480 people. 1 January 2015 - 8.123 person 20 December 2015 - 10.603 person
Heavy-Shtopor
P0nyStark
Hitting on the left part of house redirecting you on Youtube.
Hitting on the left part of house redirecting you on Deviantart.
Scotchlover
Wait-sama
Breadblack
Viosers
Wanr
foreverforum
FrvrStallone
Jewtilian
predatorslow
Birthday of SFM_RU group (3 years).
SourceSTUFF was born
New menu in SFM_RU group
28 june
13 september
8 october 10
VK Group News The best from issue to issue
The most beloved
IK-Rigger for Non-Biped Models
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Widowmaker from Overwatch
Pip-Boy 3000 Mark IV (Fallout 4)
Floaty magic crap
Crying soul
The most discussed
Announcement of the contest done by SFM_RU и gmvk
SFM Python Module Pack [Beta!]
X-01 Power Armor Fallout 4
“The Red Fury 2” teaser
New Year map
Fallout 4 Synths
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KrasniyB
Hi, Ruslan! Tell us something about yourself. Hello, stranger. My name’s Ruslan and I’m in a bloody great mood. I do what I want. I create the videos which I’d want to watch. KrasniyB is quite unusual nick. How have you imagined it? There is nothing special there. Once I played an onlinegame, which I consider to be the best in the world. There were very lovely lambs as the pets. They had white fur, little eyes and big horns. I liked them so much that I decided to call myself “Red Lamb”. And when I had to choose my channel’s title, I didn’t think about it for very long. Or, on the contrary, I was choosing it for too long... Frankly speaking, I forgot. (From the translator: in Russian the word “lamb” starts with the letter “b”) How have you started working with SFM? If there were people who told you how to do it? Or did you discover it by yourself? I drew stupid cartoons in Macromedia Flash when I was at school. I’ve always been interested in creating videos. And when “Meet the Pyro” preview and SFM were released, I immediately started to learn SFM. My first things were awful, but that time I thought they were brilliant. Sometimes I think that nothing has changed...Well, I digress. My first real video was two minutes long. I had been working for 4 months to get a perfect, useless two minutes. But I liked it and I’ve started writing down all the video ideas I have. It’s strange, but people started to watch my videos. But I haven’t taken that seriously. I continued to create foolish plots. And I thought they should be nice to me regardless of what other’s think. Why is TF2 world most preferable for you? It’s funny, but I think the thing is in laziness. I was too lazy to work with other models from other games. And the huge number of models in TF2 looked great. Frankly speaking, it’s not my favourite world. Of course, Valve’s videos are genious. They have both fun and violence connected 15
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perfectly. But I have never been a fan of the sniper with the jar of urine or the virgin scout. There are funny psychedelic images and very dramatic stories among your works. Where do you get the inspiration from? Where do you get the ideas? I can get inspiration from everywhere, for example, that could be a nice print on t-shirt or some other stuff. My own senses, stories, relationships are also good sources. On the other side there is music, alcohol and girls. I like drama. There isn’t alot of real hopelessness nowadays. That’s why I think of it so fondly. Making psycadelic videos, I don’t have any frames of reference. The thoughts flow and mix. As a result I get something new. It’s a clear feeling... Like watching a bang. There is nothing useless. All I taste in my life affects my ideas and mood. It’s very clear that music is very important part of your videos. Tell us something about that. Oh, it’s easy. I think that there is good and bad music. If it’s good, it’s very pleasant to listen to its story. Good music i want to cuddle, like a Lollipop, and let her tell her story. The music is in the start of any of my videos. Then the plot, and so on. What could you advise to the beginners in SFM? What would you like to know when you were the beginner yourself? If you’d like to have the same result as me, forget about guides. If you’d like to know more, read the guides and listen to clever people. How are you doing? I mean your “Decay of War” video. Thanks for asking. I work on it every day. I make it better in any way possible. I constanly compare what I’ve done and what I have now. All the details you can see now have been done because I want you to feel exactly what I would like you to feel.
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Do you have a a hobby? Yeah, I like to take photos. I dislike the result. That means I have goals to reach. I started taking photos two years ago. I’ve looked for the things I’d like. Do you have any future plans? I’ll balance the ideas in my head and the things which are taking place on the screen. Sometimes I don’t get enough movement smoothness. This don’t let me to like my result. Say something to our readers and your fans. Live in the moment, be the heroes of every day. There are lots of things to be tasted in life. ;) Thank you for the interview! Youtube - link VK - link
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Documents: The Hit Author: Patrick Hunt
In the prevous part of “Documents…” I did just another thriller. The end. When I was doing the first part’s music, some new shots had been already done. And after the “Documents: Payback” edition I have started to create other shots of my hero’s new story. The new thing isn’t connected with the first one. Russian immigrant with irish history decided to end up with the old acquaintances. That’s what the new story is about. I had the plot inside my mind when the script had been half-written. I’ve got both the fight scene idea and action place from “Heat” (1995). Also, there is the common thing in the titles. They’re “The Hit” and “Heat”. I decided to use the idea that I didn’t use in 2014 “Payback”. The attack on the escort. Altough that time, I hadn’t blocked the route and took the helicopter instead. And I thought it would be nice this time to have an armoured jeep fight another armoured jeep. So I did just that. I introduced some new characters, with similarities to people in real life. Some people thought this was a way to vent my anger at anoying people. But that’s wrong. I wouldn’t like to insult somebody or make some rude suggestions about them. I take some events and create my own story based on it. There’re lots of things done like that. My “Documents” isn’t an exception. That’s all. The main “bad guy” is perfectly normal (borderline cliche). He’s a drug dealer from Russia, who has useful acquaintances on both sides and uses people as he 23
wants. His private guards are corrupt policemen, escorting him from point A to point B. Where did they come from and where they will go? It’s up to viewer. For example, this would be the move to the prison. I got the map from Tractical Intervention. I’ve developed it for a bit as I was uncertian. And I got the place of action looking like crossroad in N town. Before starting to animate the story, I downloaded the map in SFM. While watching it, I wrote my ideas about the background design and plot’s in my notebook. And I found what I needed fast. It was a part of the road. I took some cars and they fitted perfectly. I didn’t even need to change the road width. Athough I dislike amimating transport, I decided to do that. I worked on vehicle suspension and smoothness of stopping with my own hands. But the thing is that all these efforts were hard to notice looking from the first view. And I was ready to change them in almost every shot. Altough I could not be bothered with that, the antagonist was also done by myself. As for transport, the suspension is the most important thing you should pay attention to while working with it. The suspension always reacts to car’s movements. And you can use computer games as an example. The start and the stop look unreal, but impressive. And I did like that when I was animating the antagonist’s armoured jeep. It was a moment slip and then the suspension has reacted to such an aggressive start.
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All in all, it’s an animation, not a car simulator. So our perspective is sitting inside the last car as the escort starts to move. There is nothing special about it. But, when the crash occurs, there are glass fragments everywhere. I needed to do a sudden stop for the attacker. And the suspension has been taken into account as the Hammer sharply deaccelerated due to the blow. And in the same moment, the police get out their cars and start calling for backup. However, this moment isn’t shown to us for obvious reasons: the police cars had no door bones, unlike the protagonist’s car. I’ll try to justify myself by saying that I really tried to decompile the police cars model and add bones. So I ask a reader to not call me lazy. But still, none of decompiles I have could give me a properly working source code. I only saw a large amount of broken files and missing polygons, it was sad. The same thing happened with the jeep from the convoy, which was supposed to be damaged. But the models proved to be smarter than me several times. The protagonist gets out of the jeep (thanks to a great animation), emotions are increasing, music is building for the next act of aggression and BAM! Here it begins: the classic battle with “shifty enemies”. In the meantime, as the police try to stop my character with cinematic screams such as “Stop! Get on the ground!”. They proceed to shoot somewhere near him, he wastes no time and starts “sending” 7.62 calibre to everyone. In reality, this situation would have ended at the stage of breaking away from the hammer, but I’ll use the typical excuse: “Well, it’s a movie!” It took less than a minute, from the moment one of the officers called for backup. A cavalry of Special Forces 25
operatives arrives and, at first sight, it was too late. However, it should be noted that I had planned to make the detective animated movie way before any “Documents”. And I hoped I would pay much more attention to the huge amount of details. For these purposes, I have read a lot of articles and literature about policing in the United States. I can tell that, according to statistics, the average time for the police to appear is six minutes. Don’t forget about the large city we have in the movie so when we consider the actions of the rapid response
team and combine it with a police escort with an important suspect. Isn’t it strange that the police arrived in less than 2 minutes? But of course, this comes out the theory of “cinematic time” when two minutes in movie lasted five minutes in real time or vise-versa. As the protagonist stops suffering John Wick’s syndrome and begins getting pelleted by glass shards, he climbs down from the hood of the car. The operatives take up positions and make a command to reciprocate. Russians don’t surrender! The protagonist reloads
his rifle and throws a can of gasoline on the enemy’s car. A can was carefully stored in the trunk of his Hummer. After undermining the can with a well-aimed shot, he takes off and hides behind a newly arrived vehicle, whose appeance was predicted in the previous shot. My character is having a desperate firefight with the operatives from his cover, while transport with Dmitriy burns. Originally this scene didn’t even exist, so this moment had to be completely different. The plan was to get Dmitriy out with a gun he stole from the driver and 26
make him continue shooting through the hoarde of police cars following the best traditions of “drag the bags from one machine to another” from Payday 2. But it turned out to be another scene of a firefight with Special Forces. Then the dialogue in their native language starts and at this point begins to intrigue us: “Why is this Patrick speaking Russian?” Because… reasons! The dialogue is filled with typical phrases. The antagonist has a lot of nerve. His words are absorbed with the juiciest cliches of Hollywood - sarcasm, threats to deal with the protagonist’s family etc. Initially, we wanted to create a dialogue of a completely different type: the antagonist is in fear, he tries to choke the protagonist with rude words, but he simply plays cat and mouse with him. However, in consideration of the painfully long running time, the dialogue was cut to a couple of sentences. At this point the active process of shooting stood up. I hit a plot’s dead end. What’s next? What should happen after the dialogue? We did a lot of thinking on this issue. We even tried to introduce the sister of the protagonist as a fully-fledged character. But where do we put her? Should we add her as another sniper on the roof? This idea got scrapped quickly. I fixed parts of the technical plan during the deliberation over the development of the plot. I got to fix some animations, re-animated facial expressions, worked on the background etc. Unfortunately, as I said earlier, the map wasn’t stable, so I didn’t have an opportunity to build a global light on it. For this reason, in order to represent the shadows under the cars, I did a very sneaky trick: I added negative light sources to the cars in the form of rectangles, which gave the darkness instead of the light and, thereby, this made shadows. Compared to the first episode, 27
it was a drop in the quality of lighting, but I just had no choice. If I would have started over again or got to adapt all the animation for a different map, it would have taken weeks, and also would make me lose all my motivation. After lots of thinkings I decided to to explode the burning jeep and push Hummer that was on a handbrake at that moment with an explosion. If you look narrowly you will see that this crossroad lies on a tapered surface, so that’s why it moves away from the explosion. If this situation happened in reality, such a heavy vehicle wouldn’t even move. So this Hummer became an effective cover for my character who was chasing Dmitri, while the special force units were recovering after the explosion and changing their positions. With boiling adrenaline in blood, protagonist decided not to shoot his opponent at once; he stood up and ran after his enemy in order not to be caught by the police. But this scene was not planned too. Instead of this there should have been another final scene, where Dmitri, who thought he was able to escape my character, was shot on the way out of his cover. The second variant included Dmitri’s attempts to steal a stationary vehicle and being shot by the protagonist in the salon of the car. The main character gets a grip on himself and shoots in the back of running Dmitri. That’s the end? No. Don’t forget about the cops. SWAT’s briefs in USA say that their main objective is to capture the suspect by any means, avoiding killing him. This fact is often ignored in movies and the cops crumble the suspects and the environment. My film – my rules. So that’s why the sniper appears in the frame. He accurately shoots Patrick’s left arm with 5.56 bullet. The fall. Sighs full of pain. Hallucinations.
My character is having a desperate firefight with the operatives from his cover, while transport with Dmitriy burns.
The plan was to get Dmitriy out with a gun he stole from the driver and to make him continue shooting through the hoarde of police cars following the best traditions of “drag the bags from one machine to another� from Payday 2.
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of flashbacks. Destiny reminds the protagonist that he’s not immortal and he can lose his life like dozens of his victims did. This scene is full of sequences from other different games. Multicolored lamps twinkle second intervals, some people do some random stuff. Viewer is intrigued and doesn’t understand what’s happening. We’re in reality again. Protagonist is writhing; special forces are cheerfully running towards him. If you zoom in, you will see a serious screw-up – the fire on the jeep suddenly went out and you can see an undamaged windscreen. Considering the vehicle banged loudly for the whole area. Suddenly a car knocks down the cop, it’s driver shoots at another one and opens the door in front of Hunt. Sudden titles appear on the screen, action music theme playing in the background. Final touch – a scene after the titles, that makes us understand that the global lighting is very important, because neither bodies nor shells have no shadows. Of course I could fit it all in three or
four minutes, but I wanted to keep the audience in suspense for the entire eight minutes. Perhaps the soundtrack inspired by composition “Force Market” from “The Heat” didn’t evolve enough and made the movie a bit overlong. Perhaps the action was too slow. I can’t say anything about it, so that’s why I leave this privilege to the audience. I hope in the third episode I will balance dialogues, action scenes and other elements to keep ciewer interested. And in perspective I’ll try to answer all the questions from the viewers that appeared after the watching of this trilogy and reveal all the characters that appeared in the movies. That’s the end now.
A journey along the paths of 2015 in Team Fortress 2 The most significant event that occurred for the entire year.
01.07.
01.15.
Fixes to most critical bugs and errors introduced with the “Smissmass 2014 update”.
End of the “TF Tomb contest” and start of the patch wave.
08.27.
08.18.
Introduction of “Mann Co. Trade-Up” system and “Gun Mettle Cosmetic Case”.
“Invasion” major update.
Added new game mode “PASS Time”, reworked reward for reporting.
10.06 10.28
“Scream Fortress VII” major update and start of the “Arkham Knight Contest”.
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Fixes to mo introduced
12.04
End of the “Arkham Knight Contest”.
03.12.
06.02.
“Taunt Workshop” announcement and updated sounds for most melee weapons.
“Maps Workshop Beta”
06.11. 07.03.
ost critical bugs and errors d with the “Gun Mettle” update.
“Tough Break”
“Mann Co Store Sale”.
07.02.
“Gun Mettle” major update, introduction of “Pick-up dropped weapons” system.
12.XX
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TF2 — Results of 2015 2015 proved to be a quite controversial year for a gradually losing it’s popularity wardrobe multiplayer shooter, which finally stepped beyond limits and evolved into a purebred posturing simulator with a broken economic component. Originally, tf served as a experimental ground for untested innovations, that later migrated to more popular Valve’s products, but as the time passed by, he himself began to steal their time-tested ideas, even though there was already more than enough unimportant things in the game. And most of them served one purpose - earn more money on interest or passion of users, providing them enticing content. The reasons for such drasting changes was the impact of Yanis Varoufakis (current Finance Minister of Greece), who was hired to evaluate the methodology of Valve’s company
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just a couple of years ago, and the redistribution of working composition department responsible for subsequent development of Team Fortress 2, which eventually left it with people with virtually zero knowledge on the rules of work with this particular product and what they actually need to do and what they shouldn’t. However, this year turned out to be extremely fruitful for user generated content and self renewal. But the number of critical mistakes that led to unplayable product and overall discomfort also exceeded the record bar. But first things first.
December 22 – January 7 Waking up New Year’s morning and immediately sat down at the computer users fairly quickly noticed the «black curse» hanging over anyone who dared to enter the game. During the whole two weeks period players been terrorized by the broken Stickybomb Launcher, which seemed to completely forgot about such concepts as the fall-off and air-burst, and applied the maximum amount of damage regardless of the circumstances. Many did not understand that it was just a bug and still believe that the most unbalanced weapon in the game ever will receive the inevitable upgrade someday. January 15 TF Tomb contest, which came to its inevitable end, pleased us with the set of six appropriate to the overall art- style of the game cosmetics, despite the fact that one of them was almost an exact copy of already existing Halloween item. Much bigger surprise was the addition of “Pubstars vs. Pros 6vs9” 2010 and 2011 tournament medals, which certainly pleased those few who still remember about their own participation in them. Mart 12 After a few minor updates with not countable number of patch notes, that fixed many crashes and such unusual things as the inability to receive items while using the Ukrainian version of the game or having invisible weapons in the hands of the characters, the «Taunt Workshop» appeared, once again expanding the list of possible ways of contribution that can earn you some cash. This date also represent the death of old distribution system used within crates, as the last one of them was added to the game. June 2 The next significant date fell on the second day of summer, bringing us «Maps Workshop» and weird feeling that any need for third-party sites for demonstration and dissemination of custom content for the game is almost removed.
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June 11 – July 1 A small and hardly even noticeable by anyone summer Mann Co. Store sale suddenly appeared, lowering prices for the most popular and demanded items. Off course those weren’t Keys, Mvm Tickets, or even Name Tags. July 2 – «Gun Mettle Update” Throughout the spring we were fed by small patches that optimized gameplay and got rid of ancient bugs, preparing us to something important. To the great joy and equally great regret of many, this important event wasn’t the introduction of competitive mode, but a new way of expanding possibilities of character customization. However, at the same time, update has brought us a number of important changes, reworking some items or even gameplay mechanics, which shocked the whole conscious part of community, because such ambiguous update was never done before. An important innovation was the possibility to borrow weapons fallen from dead players, that generated a lot of controversy, and, of course, got quickly banned in eSports leagues, which as usualy, refused to diversify the well established over several years meta. From an economic point of view, the update also came out incredibly successful. Paid access to a specific set of tasks took users that wanted to create a unique image of their classes, to a dead end. Familiar to all users crate items distribution system subjectified as «random unbox» was replaced by «tier pools” from the infamous CS: GO, leaving the majority of users in front of not the most pleasant choice: pay a significant amount of money or remain without desired things.
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July 3 – July 6 According to invariable tradition, every major update for TF2 breaks more than it adds. Gun Mettle was no exception to this rule. And if the opportunity to craft promotional items, unbox «Normal Quality» weapons and receive universal MvM fabricators only influenced economy addicted traders, the broken rocketjump mechanics, ability to pick weapons of any class as spy and return of mighty «last point on pl explosion» bug had ruined the game for many regular players. All of these bugs have been fixed within a few days, but the unpleasant aftertaste remained. August 18 The large wave of bugfixes lead to a beta release of a new game mode called «PASS Time», which was kind of variation of a socker game, that complemented list of unfinished and unneeded projects inside main game. New game mode was clearly inferior in the quality of performance to existing over two years «Mannpower», whose success will be irrefutable with deletion of the grappling hook. «Pass Time» has lost most of it’s popularity just in a couple of days. Not every day someone find serious exploit that can undermine already barely standing in-game economy. Even more rarely they report it to the developers, instead of just taking advantage of it for personal gain. Already rarely granted as a reward for reporting critical bugs, the awarded items were dropped in quality from any unusual cosmetic item with any effect to a beetle cap (with any effect) that is neither have the original design, nor at least a decent appearance.
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August 27 Realizing that the accumulated thousands of similar colored scatterguns, that peacefully lying in our inventory, not demanded by even the laziest players, TF2 team decided to put an end to this, so they won’t suffer the same fate as devaluated refined metal and right before the official end of the «Gun Mettle» campaign (subsequently extended by one month afterwards), introduced «Trade-Up» system which allowed players to put ten undesired items to receive one a little less undesirable. Update also added brand new crate with cosmetic items, which content was available on the same new-fangled principle used with weapon cases. Crate contained items of varying quality: from the stylish Wild West Waistcoat to abominable hat in the shape of a banana, which at first confused alot of snipers due to the changed head silhouete. October 6 A month after the events described above, as well as after the next wave of important fixes, the world finally saw the long-awaited and often-delayed «Invasion Update» - community driven project, that pleased us with such nice things as the ability to craft items that shoud’ve been available Only in the new crates and great experience of collecting beer for alien newcomers. Despite the fact that content contribution was available only trough tiered paywall system, which once again divided players into «elitist» and «everyman» categorie, update itself has satisfied even the most demanding users. The reason for this was the presence of four detailed maps, ideally suited for casual fun on public servers, available to all newcomers for free. October 26 Accompanied by an even greater number of minor fixes that have become almost a symbol of this year’s updates, «Scream Fortress» has once again surprised everyone. But this time, with the lack of original content. Of course we were given the opportunity to participate in last year’s events, diluted by daily contracts, which in fact destroyed the old haloween gift system, limiting players to thirteen items and completely ignoring existence «Halloween Spells», that are now not obtainable in any way. New community maps were very pleasing to the 37
eye, but playing them wasn’t nearly as comfortable as we would like. And due to a broken server browser, disabling ability to connect to any non halloween servers, there’s not much choice was given. The usual abundance of inconceivable cosmetic items was replaced by unimpressing caps and kittens. However, traditional curse of big updates wasn’t left behind and surprised us with the inability to do critical damage in some situations, treacherously replaced by a mini-critical damage even when making headshots.. October 29 Correction of this error unexpectedly resulted in turning any incoming damage to a critical when using Battalion’s Backup. But along with it was announced a «Batman Arkham Knight Contest», which certainly dilute our loadouts with a couple of stylish rubber ears. December 4 But besides different sets of belts and various replacements of Pyro’s head, this update draws our attention to the peaceful and inconspicuous «Workshop Wonderland» passing right in front of our face, though it doesn`t claim the title of community update dedicated to Christmas and filled with a high quality content.
Over the past year TF2 managed to survive a lot of controversial changes. Although not the most abundant amount of original content, the developers fixed numerous game flaws and, hopefully, will not stop there.
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SFM for newbies Answers for common questions Author: SFM_RU
How to remove lighting from the map?
How to make negative lighting?
You can use toneMapScale slider in the camera settings to darken the scene.
Click with RMB on “Intensity” on the lighting; choose RemapSliderRange and shange “min” definition from 0 to -100. Now you can make black light.
ATTENTION: this method will darken the whole picture, but not the lighting. Consequently glowing elements of models and particles will be darkened too. You can change map lighting only in Hammer editor.
How to create spherical lighting? SFM doesn’t support such features; try to reach similar effect with existing tools.
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How to make soft/rough shadows? shadowFilterSizq and radius sliders are responsible for this. ATTENTION: radius unlike shadowFilterSize requires higher render settings and it will take more time to render.
How to create more than 8 lighting elements? SFM allows only 8 lights with shadows. Toggle shadows on some lighting elements off. • Click RMB at the light in Animetion Set Editor • Choose Disable Shadows
How to make transform light greater in width than in height? You’ll need to toggle Uberlight for it. • Create a new light • Click with RMB on the viewport then choose ShowInElementViewer → Light • Tick the box in front of uberlight • Adjust the light using width and light sliders
How to improve the quality of the shadows? Sometimes when you work with dynamical global lighting there’s a lack of shadow’s resolution. To avoid visual artifacts and pixel shadows run SFM with startup options ‘-sfm_shadowmapres X’ (without quotes) where X – resolution number multiple of two. It’s better not to set more than 8192. Native shadows resolution is 2048 px. • Open “Software” subsection in your Steam library • Press with RMB at SourceFilmmaker and choose Properties • Select Setlaunchoptions in appeared window • Type your options and press ok -sfm_shadowmapres 4096 ATTENTION: SFM’s performance may significantly decrease or it will crash when you will open your projects. ATTENTION: use shadowFilterSize and radius sliders to smooth the shadows. Use the method described above only in extreme case. грузке проектов.
Materials provided by SFM_RU. 40
Christmas Time!
What do mercenaries from TF2 on Christmas? Members and users from SFM_RU and DA decided to show how mercenaries have a good time on Christmas and New Year.
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Author - Marothemaker Spy decided to take a side job on “Polar Express� at leisure.
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Author - ClassicFiction Some outdoor winter games with three mercs from the blue team.
Author - Daniil Gromenko What is the New Year without presents? That’s how thinks the pyro, dressed in New-Year attire and prepared to open his gifts.
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Author – Alexander Galdin And what`s a New Year without the tales? That’s how thinks this kind Santa-engineer, reading the fairytales to his little mercs.
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Author – Nikita Bykov How impatient today’s children are! Instead of sleeping in her bad, the little girl is taking photos of Santa who is really surprised by this.
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Author – Nikita Bykov Demo’s family became kinda numerous by this New Year!
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Author – Sergey Myasnikov The return of the arsonist! Now he set someone’s Christmas tree on fire and ruined their celebration.
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Author – Vlad Koltakov Daddy-Heavy and his three little Baby-Heavies are decorating a Christmas tree, without a notice that the fire in the fireplace will burn the whole house.
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Автор - ClassicFiction What can be better than the festive dancing? Certainly nothing.
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February 12 The Year Beast Brawl Event
March 19 Facelift Void
April 24 Анонс системы мажор турниров
April 27 Update 6,84
May 22 “Dota 2 Short Film Contest”
May 26 “The International” qualifiers
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Dota 2
2015 Summary
December 4 The Shanghai “Major”
November 16 The Frankfurt “Major”
September 24 Update 6,85
September 11 “Dota Levels”
July27-30 “The International” group stage
June 12 “Dota 2 Reborn”
News Some steam and non-steam news from issue to issue.
Pre-Purchase Now - Total War™: ATTILA – Age of Charlemagne Campaign Pack
Syber Steam Machines are on sale for one day only! Act now and save $200 on any of the Syber Steam
In 1979, Iranian filmmaker John Rad moved to the US to shoot his dream project: a rampaging gutter epic of crime, revenge, and raw power. A mere 26 years later, he completed an action masterpiece the world is still barely ready for: DANGEROUS MEN. After witnessing her fianc’s brutal murder, Mina sets out on a venomous revenge spree through LA, armed with a knife, a gun, and undying rage. 59
The Steam Exploration Sale starts now, with discounts on thousands of games and software running through Black Friday and Cyber Monday! Offers end Tuesday December 1 at 10AM Pacific unless otherwise listed.
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Start your 3D Artist career and create top quality game-art. Understand 3Ds Max with the Basics & Beyond Chapter and learn how to model and unwrap in the following hours.
190+ minutes worth of tutorials about creating Dynamic Lighting in your paintings.
This is a tutorial video that teaches basic things to help you understand design.
Fresh out of Early Access, DiRT Rally is Now Available on Steam, currently 15% off the Early Access price!
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Compromised accounts and item theft
A difficult balance
Account theft has been around since Steam began, but with the introduction of Steam Trading, the problem has increased twenty-fold as the number one complaint from our users. Having your account stolen, and your items traded away, is a terrible experience, and we hated that it was becoming more common for our customers. Once an account was compromised, the items would be quickly cleaned out. They’d then be traded again and again, eventually being sold to an innocent user. Looking at their account activity, it wasn’t too hard to figure out what happened, but undoing it was harder because we don’t want to take things away from innocent users. We decided to err on the side of protecting them: we left the stolen goods, and we created duplicates on the original compromised account to replace them. We were fully aware of the tradeoff here. Duplicating the stolen items devalues all the other equivalent items in the economy. This might be fairly minor for common items, but for rare items this had the potential to significantly increase the number in existence.
Once again, we’re fully aware that this is a tradeoff with the potential for a large impact on trading. Any time we put security steps in between user actions and their desired results, we’re making it more difficult to use our products. Unfortunately, this is one of those times where we feel like we’re forced to insert a step or shut it all down. Asking users to enter a password to log into their account isn’t something we spend much time thinking about today, but it’s much the same principle - a security cost we pay to ensure the system is able to function. We’ve done our best to make the cost as small as possible, for as few people as possible, while still retaining its effectiveness. Hopefully this post has given you some insight into the problem, and why we’ve taken this approach. As always, we’ll continue to read the community’s discussions throughout the Steam forums and the web at large, and we look forward to hearing your thoughts.
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Sister Rust DrMeowsAlot DA - link SFM
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Art Gallery
SFM and Gmod works from around the world
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Forest blackjack474 DA - link Gmod
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Untitled Egor Zhukov DA - link Gmod
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Battle Ship Viosers DA -link SFM
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Untitled Vasily Nefyodov VK -link Gmod
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Untitled Alexander Koshubaro VK - link SFM 73
Untitled Vasily Nefyodov VK -link Gmod 74
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Iron Heart Jewtilian DA -link SFM 76
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Black Hawk in the jungle Dkud DA - link Gmod
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Evening Phase
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DoQp DA - link SFM
Capture Zone Deniszizen DA - link SFM
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I’ll Be Your Light ClassicFiction DA - link SFM
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Radioactive storm Dkud DA - link Gmod 83
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Papyrus The Terminator. Heavy-shtopor DA - link SFM
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unnamed Alexander Scherba VK - link SFM
Dear readers! Here comes our section “Art gallery”. And here you can find cool works all over the world. It doesn’t matter who creates the picture, what its theme and how it is done. The most important thing for us in this section - beauty. Oh, you can bribe our editors. If you’d like, you could transfer some money to the bank account (0578 1245 9856 2154). Hope, that our chief editor won’t take this out. Try hard enough and your efforts will be rewarded! And the most important part - efforts of less than 200 c.u. will not be accepted.
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Letters to Editors Your interesting stories or wishes If you’d like to see your story here instead of these cats, don’t be confused to write us. As the topic you can choose SFM, TF2, Dota 2 story, or anything you’d like. You can write to our chief editor or send your message to our group.
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b t s u D t a ax
Immerse yourself in the world of the pocket medics with Sticky Airlines
The true origin of spawncamping!