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Contributing

As an open source project, mastercomfig appreciates the community’s help in improving it.

We welcome contributions of any type or size, from anyone!

Reporting issues

We always welcome reporting issues, whether it be bug reports or feature requests, you can help guide the development of mastercomfig to suit your needs and improve mastercomfig for everyone!

Contact the maintainer

mastercomfig is currently maintained by mastercoms. You can contact me on Steam, Reddit or by email at [email protected]. I’d be happy to chat about any problems or suggestions you have for mastercomfig.

Docs

Have a screenshot, workaround or anything else interesting you’d like to share?

Are you a translator who wishes to add or improve content in your own language?

Contribute to the docs by clicking the edit button on any page you’d like to change!

You can also take a look at the full source folder to add new files or take a look around.

Adding a new language

You can view currently supported languages here.

Add your language plus its native name to plugins.i18n.languages in mkdocs.yml.

Adding content in a language

Add a .[lang] before the file type.

For example, index.ru.md or logo.ru.png.

Support

You can help users who ask questions on Discord, Steam Discussions or teamfortress.tv.

Config

Want to contribute to the config itself? Start here!

Getting started

The config has a certain standard of quality for references and will not accept changes based on simple hearsay or assumptions.

Every setting and change must be based on information found in Team Fortress 2 blog posts/patch notes, the Valve Developer Wiki, the Source SDK, so make sure those are available to you before you start contributing. File overrides like DX support, shader cache, texture preload and client precache must be updated according to changes tracked by Steam Database.

Find a task

There might be TODOs within the files that need to be completed, issues that need to be closed or maybe something new you came up with. For any of these, make sure you communicate that you’re going contribute to resolve that issue or implement that feature so that there isn’t any duplicated work going on.

Making changes

First things first: use spaces (no tabs) and CRLF line endings for configs, and continue the Valve convention in the other file overrides. Ensure no trailing space at the end of lines.

Launch options

Launch options are documented on the docs and are formatted like this:

**-launchoption** : launch option description

Make sure the description is not sentence case and starts with a lowercase letter.

There are currently 4 categories for launch options:

  • Recommended: These are launch options everyone should be using, as they benefit all users
  • Extra: These are launch options people find to be personal preference or for use cases that cannot be applied to all users
  • Uncommon: These are launch options most people will not use, but will still satisfy a valid use case
  • Experimental: These are launch options that are being tested to be moved elsewhere as their effects are not clear

Put your launch option in the appropriate section and if it’s in the Recommended section, add it to the launch options line for copying.

Here’s lists of launch options to help you out:

Information about generating them can be found here.

Comfig and presets

Note: some additional information about the config can be found here.

Add options like this:

convar 0 // What the command does and a bit about what this default
         // value does, possibly with why it is the default
//convar 1 // What this alternative does

As you can see, default ConVar values are at the beginning, with alternatives coming after. Unlike the launch options, use sentence case. Avoid punctuation unless using multiple sentences.

CVarlist

ConVars and commands are found using these instructions.

Add your alternatives uncommented in the applicable presets/addons, or use modules.

Presets
  • none: Special preset which skips setting quality options
  • ultra: Absolute maximum quality, with even the slightest and most performance-intensive quality improvements included
  • high: Enables all graphical features without making them extremely high quality
  • medium-high: Disables unoptimized features and optimize the game without making it look bad
  • medium: The maximum performance you can get while enabling a few effects that may give you a slight edge
  • medium-low: The maximum performance you can get without making the game too hard to play because of awful visual quality and glitches
  • low: Maximum performance without caring much about visibility or possible bugs
  • very-low: Negatively affects playability by a lot and disables very essential features in desperation for performance
Addons
  • no-footsteps: Removes footstep sounds
  • disable-pyroland: Removes Pyroland map textures
  • no-soundscapes: Removes soundscapes (ambient map noise) and bird noises
  • no-tutorial: Disables tutorial messages and other popups
  • flat-mouse: Makes mouse input “flat” with stable input, no acceleration and 1:1 zoom sensitivity
  • transparent-viewmodels: Enables support for transparent viewmodels
  • null-cancelling-movement: Prevents you from pressing two opposing directions, which causes you to stop moving
  • lowmem: Optimizations that generally do not affect quality for low memory (RAM) systems (2GB and lower)
Modules

If your settings affect quality in any way, create a new module or modify the existing modules if applicable, then add documentation for it at the modules docs page.

The first part of adding modules is a multi-step process in config/mastercomfig/cfg/comfig/comfig.cfg:

  • Add the module level alias(es) (alias module_level "cvar1 1; cvar2 0)
  • For every command in the module, all levels must set that command unless there is no impact at that level.
  • Add the set module level alias(es) (alias module=level"alias module module_level")
  • Possibly adjust presets in config/cfg/presets to use the new module or levels to an existing module

If you are adding a new module, you will also need to add a new module entry in config/mastercomfig/cfg/comfig/modules_run.cfg

You also have to add your new module or levels to data/modules.json for download site support and to config/templates/modules/modules.cfg.

Texture preload list

The texture_preload_list.txt file is designed to tell Team Fortress 2 which textures to load on startup. Strip all nonexistent textures from the default one if there is a major TF2 update, and then add your changes. Preloaded textures must be common enough to warrant the extra startup time and memory usage.

Client precache

The scripts/client_precache.txt file is similar to the texture preload list, but it is for sounds and models. Also similarly to the texture preload list, strip any nonexistent entries and then add your changes, making sure that the entries in the precache are common enough to warrant the extra startup time and memory usage.

Shader cache

The OpenGL shader pair cache is located at glbaseshaders.cfg and glbaseshaders_osx.cfg. This is a value store for each shader program, which is an indexed subkey. The first value is the vertex shader name, the second is the pixel shader name, third is the vertex shader static index, fourth is the pixel shader static index, fifth is the vertex shader dynamic index and sixth is the pixel shader dynamic index.

DX support

Edit dxsupport_override.cfg and set hidden ConVars and other settings according to hardware and DirectX level. Make sure there are no updates to this file from the game repository (unlikely, was last updated in 2013) before making changes.

Game overrides

Some ConVars are set from what the map author specified so we have to override them. This is currently done in modules.

DX Support overrides

Some ConVars cannot be set in-game, even with DX support definitions. Thus, some presets have custom packaging overrides to set the value in DX support.

Creating your pull request

Yay! You made your changes and now it’s time to send it off to be included in the config. Create a new pull request and name it something nice and descriptive! In your post, include an explanation of the changes, why you made those changes, along with any other information you find important.

Testing Config Changes

There are several steps it is recommended you take before making or accepting changes to the config. You can use Fraps or MSI Afterburner to get an FPS measurement of matches.

Benchmarking

Use mastercoms’ new test benchmark to do basic testing on options.

Bot match

After the results are positive with the benchmark, measure your average FPS in a local 32 player bot match on pl_upward. (use +maxplayers 32 in launch options).

Casual match

After the results are positive with the local bot match, measure your average FPS in a filled casual match.

Packaging

Generally you won’t have to do this, but you can generate VPK packages for all presets and addons. Use the package.sh script in the dev/ folder. You can learn more about the dev scripts in dev/README.md.

To successfully package presets and addons you need:

  • Installed TF2 and Steam with all dependencies
  • bash and basic UNIX tools
  • VPK
  • gh
  • You must authenticate beforehand, for example using gh auth login, or the GH_TOKEN env var
  • GNU parallel (optional)

Additionally, to generate No Tutorial addon, you will need to create a new file in dev/ called mastercomfig-vars, containing the following:

#!/bin/sh
export TF2_DIR="absolute path to your Team Fortress 2 directory"

This variable can also come from your system environment.

Release and announce scripts

If you want to test the scripts that upload to GitHub and/or announce in Discord, append following to your mastercomfig-vars file:

export DISCORD_WEBHOOK="Discord webhook for release notifications"

These variables can also come from your system environment.

Code of Conduct

As a member of the mastercomfig community, to foster a more welcoming environment, you must abide by the Code of Conduct.


Last update: June 28, 2021
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