Orangebox Switching to SteamPipe - Possible TF2 server downtime

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Both a heads up for everyone and some prep for when this does go live. I don't know whether it will entail having to rebuild the servers or not (depends on how much of a headache it is to convert or rebuild), but in either case there may be a bit of TF2 server downtime when it comes time to do this switch.

The orangebox engine games (Team Fortress 2, Counter Strike:Source, Day of Defeat:Source, HL2:Deathmatch) are being upgraded to SteamPipe. Steam's new-and-improved content delivery system. SteamPipe is currently used by most games on Steam.

This change will impact server operators in at least two significant ways:


* You will use steamcmd instead of the HLDSUpdateTool to install/update the server.

* The conversion will entail significant changes to the way the files appear in the local filesystem on the server and client. The client no longer uses GCF files. Instead, most assets are packed up into VPK, and those VPKs are the same on the server and the client. The server no longer uses 1000's of loose files.

We're using the TF beta to test these changes and identify the bugs, and give everybody a chance to make sure their favorite mod or plugin will work in the new system.

Everybody is encouraged to download the TF beta!

We've prepared an FAQ that discusses the details of the change and answers the questions we anticipate:
https://support.steampowered.com/kb_article.php?ref=7388-QPFN-2491

Please report gameserver related bugs in this mailing list.

Client bugs can be reported through this mailing list, or in the TF beta forum.
http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=1038

Thanks for your help, and happy testing!

(And remember, playtime in the beta counts towards item drops in the release game.)

- Fletch
 
Looks like there will definitely be downtime when this switch happens. It will be necessary to completely re-download the entire TF2 server.

AFIK the current plan is the server-side update will be released prior to the client side update in order for hosts to get everything sorted and give some more time to do the upgrade.
 
They're not just doing a file conversion like they will with the clients? That sucks.
Nope.

I suspect it's because of the nature of the beast. Servers can be hacked up with a hell of a lot more content than clients and don't have their "vanilla" unmodded files packed up in GCFs to begin with. For clients they just have to handle re-indexing and re-packing the GCFs and such.
Server side there is no GCF, they'd have to essentially take the files from the directory structure and there's no guarantee what state they're in, so you could easily end up with a mess.

The change will save us a ton of disk space though as I should be able to share the new package files across all of the TF2 servers.
 

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