A couple of useful sites…

For a change, I thought I’d do something different and sell my soul and advertise a few things point out some useful sites for TF2 players to use. Everyone’s heard about the official Team Fortress 2 Wiki, which I will not shorten to TF2Wiki so you don’t get the wrong idea, but there’s a billion other useful sites around. Today, I’m going to point out four of them.

Gamebanana – tf2.gamebanana.com

Gamebanana is heaven if you want to customize your game in any way. It’s got the majority of skins, textures and all sorts for pretty much every moddable game in existence, and TF2, along with other Source games, makes up a large part of the site. There’s a skin or a mod or a file for almost everything except maybe the one thing you were looking for, but there’s a couple of places where you can tentatively ask for help. The layout is a tad messy, but it’s pretty easy to find your way around.

What’s also handy is the script section, which contains all sorts of useful scripts and stuff. It’s where I looked when I was making my Medic radar script and when I made a silly rocket jumping script. What’s slightly less handy is the vast, vast, vast number of sprays and silly stuff that fills the large gaps between the good stuff.

But we can make our own sprays, right? No?

 

TF2 Spray Maker – tfsprays.com

It’s not hard to make a spray, it really isn’t. But sometimes, you just don’t have time or the mental capacity to make one, or you want your damn spray right fricking now. Or you might want one of those fancy fading sprays, in which the image changes as you get closer or move further away. Or you want to turn a animated gif into a spray. Well, TF2 Spray Maker does all that for you. You just need to upload your picture and let it do its job. Then download the two files and plonk them into the right folder. And that’s pretty much it.

Alright, the quality isn’t 100%, but what can you expect from an automated process? It’s particularly great for all those lazy people who don’t want to download VTFEdit and a simple paint program. It does make handing animated sprays much, much easier though, so kudos for that.

 

Scrap.tf – scrap.tf

Speaking of automated stuff, who really enjoys arguing over a scrap in price with an easy-to-anger trader? Not many people, although it’s that bad all the time when it comes to real-people trading. If you despise trading with living beings that much, there’s always Scrap.tf, which does everything in an automated fashion. It started off with trading weapons for scrap metal and vice versa, but now they bank pretty much anything, keys, hats, tools, MvM scraps, stranges, DotA 2 items… actually, that’s all the stuff they bank. A word of caution though, since it’s a for profit site, you certainly won’t get the best prices. It’s generally a scrap more or less. Also they use Backpack.tf prices, so avoid buying keys there.

Everything is done using a series of bots that have been taught how to trade and stuff. Occasionally things go wrong but it’s generally very reliable. One thing though, the site will get slow when new items are released.

A very similar site isTF2 Warehouse (tf2wh.com) but instead of trading items for items, you trade them for an in-house currency called Credits. They do have a limit for trading items but it increases as you trade.

Note: ScrapWH.com does the exact same job but is apparently faster for bulk trades. Ta, Trebel.

 

TF2 Config Generator – tf2cfg.info

Is your game running slow? Probably, considering how many hats TF2 has to render these days. Unusuals everywhere, hats everywhere, miscs everywhere… You get my point. Now, most people will say “get a config of some sort!” but you might not even know what one is. Or you do know what one is but you don’t want to break anything. Thankfully TF2 Config Generator, currently in beta, is here to save the day. It’s got several DIY options, as well as stuff for servers and for those who are unadventurous, there’s also preset configurations that are ready to download.

Personally, I really like the site. If you don’t know what half the cvars do, just go through the Easy Mode section and it asks you simple questions, so you can choose what you want. Also, the backgrounds on the site are damn beautiful.

 

For a bonus site, here’s TF2Raffles, where you can potentially win free stuff, as long as you make sure that there’s only one person on your IP address, since they ban accounts with the same IP address for anti-cheating reasons. That’s not a problem though, as you can post and say “Hey, that dude is my bro!” or whatever and they’ll unban you. As for a bonus bonus site, not directly related to TF2, I stumbled across this site, SteamPrePaid, where you can win free games in raffles.

Hope this all helped!