A bit steamed news

With 3.5 around the corner and a road map for what is to come. I want to first thank people who have played vintage or at least gave it a look. You're the reason we're still alive and kicking. 3.5 proper is looking to not only improve the logic for Arena, but fixes to various bits of code and a hopeful fix of the CTD issue plaguing some users that is a result of the strings and how the game handles them. What 3.5 will bring I won't say, but there is a banner (or two) flying for it.

On the subject of steam, for those who have been on the up and up, you'll no doubt have heard our plans to bring vintage to steam and by proxy the majority of TF2 player's attention. It's no secret we can't seem to catch the eye of massive YT personalities and thus a lot of our growth has been dependent on you, the player to talk about the mod where you can. However the dreams of mods like vintage and even Lambda Fortress Extended are in Jeopardy with 08's failure to get onto steam. For those not in the loop on this, TF2 08 is a renamed TF2P or TF2 Port, which itself is the leaked somewhere around launch build of TF2. Just ported to the 2013 MP base of SDK and some bug fixes applied.

I don't know the full story, but from the screens I saw of the e-mail, vintage and to that extent all of the TF2 sourcemods out there would be reduced to clever scripting and a glorified plugin that requires TF2 installed to even play. Talking to the rest of the team, the roadmap is being worked with and we're seeing what happens. In the mean time, if you're interest in testing 3.5 head over to either the discord or steam group and help break 3.5 through our new opt-in beta test. Just remember to back up your vintage install, or better yet, dump the 3.5 files in your custom folder and overwrite your bin folder (after backing it up) for the least messy option.