Team Fortress 2 is still great for a casual gaming session in the year 2023.
Last Thursday, Gamerlicious organized a game night with the free-to-play game Team Fortress 2. Friends were able to join in between rounds. You can find the game on Steam.
In the “Mann vs. Mashine” mode, up to 6 players could defend “Mann Co.” simultaneously in a wave-based arcade style gameplay until way after midnight.
We played on a self-hosted server, which you can set up without much effort yourself. We used the cm2network container, which you can find at Docker Hub. Below is the specific setup we used.
Until next time!
The server is started using Podman or Docker. The tokens, passwords, and paths (XXXX) should be replaced accordingly. You can find a guide at https://hub.docker.com/r/cm2network/tf2
It is important to note that for the “Mann vs. Mashine” mode we played, the maximum player count of 32 (SRCDS_MAXPLAYERS=32) is significant because it includes the bots as well.
podman run -it \
--user=1000 \
-v /home/XXXX/tf2_containerdata/:/home/steam/tf-dedicated/ \
-e "SRCDS_HOSTNAME=gamerlicio.us" \
-e "SRCDS_PW=XXXX" \
-e "SRCDS_TOKEN=XXXX" \
-e "SRCDS_MAXPLAYERS=32" \
-p 27015:27015/udp \
-p 27015:27015/tcp \
-p 27020:27020/udp \
--name tf2 \
docker.io/cm2network/tf2:latest
After the initial launch, the necessary data was written to “/home/XXXX/tf2_containerdata/”. These data files can now be modified as needed.
The official and community maps can be downloaded from the following location: https://dl.serveme.tf/maps. Once downloaded, you can save them to the folder “/home/XXXX/tf2_containerdata/tf/maps/”.
cd /home/XXXX/tf2_containerdata/tf/maps/
wget -r --no-parent --accept bsp -l1 --cut-dirs=2 --no-host-directories -nc https://dl.serveme.tf/maps/koth_sawmill.bsp
By modifying the server config, you can set various options and parameters to suit your requirements, such as the RCON password.
editor /home/XXXX/tf2_containerdata/tf/cfg/server.cfg