Castaway.tf Team Fortress 2 Servers

SourceTV and server changes

I have made a few changes over the past few days and would like to catalog them here.

I have enabled SourceTV auto recording on all servers. What that means is that a demo file will be automatically recorded for every match, from this day going forward, and will be publicly available for download. Thanks to Eric Zhang for pushing me to implement it and helping with the cvars.

The goal was to boost the community's ability to create clips, though you can use it to save your favorite games.

The archive can be found here[mega.nz], and it is also available on the website. Demo files are uploaded to the mega at 5 am local time for the server. The demo uploading process, specifically the compression aspect, takes up a ton of CPU and lags the server.

Replays are stored in the archive like so:
Where Year/Month/Day are the date when the match occurred, and HourMinute are the start time of the match.

Demo files are large, especially when recording 66 ticks per second and 45 minutes of gameplay. In order to save space in the long run, I have compressed all demo files using zstd[en.wikipedia.org]. To extract the files, you will need a tool capable of decompressing zstd. You can view the github[github.com] for the zstd tool and download it from the latest release. For windows users, it will be zstd-v1.X.X-win64.zip (v1.5.6 as of writing this) and for Linux users, you can get zstd with your package manager. I apologize for not putting it in a more common format, but as I said these files are decently sized so every percent saved matters in the long run.

For assistance regarding editing demo files, you can view this thread by castaway member ejv2 for a guideline on how to use the replay editor with demo files.

I have spun up a Singapore server, our first server in Asia. Singapore was chosen just based on feedback from some of our members in Asia. As per below, it is also a weapon revert server.

I made an executive decision and converted all remaining Vanilla servers to weapon revert ones.

Let's be honest, at this point a regular vanilla server isn't enough of a draw for a consistent playerbase. The overwhelming majority of our community wants to play weapon reverts instead of modern balance, and it's reflected in player counts. Therefore, I have converted Newark, Dallas, and Frankfurt to weapon revert servers. This has the added benefit of giving people an overflow server if the main one is full, as before there was only 1 revert server per big region. More servers can be added for AUS/Asia if the demand exists and there's consistent server fills.