Team Fortress 2, released 10 years ago in 2007, has defied the usually unforgiving element of age among video games, as it continues to be one of the top 5 games on Steam with a healthy player base and an active modding community.
The game is far from perfect, though, and in a new patch released by Valve, the developer finally address a ten-year-old bug that has caused accuracy issues in the game for a decade.
The 10-Year-Old 'Team Fortress 2' Bug
The bug in Team Fortress 2 caused players to miss their targets and over the years might have led many to believe that their near misses were due to lack of skill rather than a long-standing issue.
The bug happens when a player selects to use the Scout, Sniper, or Heavy class as their first one upon joining a server, and then switching to the Soldier, Demo, Medic, Spy, Engineer, or Pyro class while still in the same server. Upon doing this, players will have the animation of their characters out of sync in between their local machine and the Team Fortress 2 server. This also happens when players first select a class from the second group and then switch into a class from the first group.
Once the bug is initiated, what happens is that the hitbox for that player is different from what the server registers. The mismatch meant that shots that should have hit that player will sometimes miss, and over 10 years of the bug being allowed to run rampant, there would have been countless shots that should have hit the mark but failed to do so.
In addition, once the bug has started, switching between classes, dying, or going into spectator mode will not clear it.
Valve Finally Fixes Accuracy Bug In 'Team Fortress 2'
In a recently released update for Team Fortress 2, one of the items in the patch notes is stated as "Fixed an animation bug that would cause the client and server hitboxes to become out of sync."
The item was called out by Redditor sigsegv_ in a Reddit post under the official Team Fortress 2 subreddit, wherein he said that the bug was discovered by Nicknine, a member of the Team Fortress 2 Classic development team.
According to sigsegv_, the issue stems from the fact that the player models for the classes in the first group had their pose parameters listed in a different way compared to the classes in the second group. The fix for the 10-year-old bug only needed adding one line of code, but the problem was knowing which line was missing and where it is in the code.
With the bug now fixed, Team Fortress 2 players should now find their shots hitting their targets more accurately, unless, of course, there are lag problems or the player is simply just not good at firing those shots.
Valve News
Valve has been making a lot of headlines recently, stemming from the media roundtable that the company hosted at its headquarters.
Valve President and cofounder Gabe Newell confirmed that the developer is working on three full-fledged virtual reality games and is currently not interested in making games for consoles. Newell also revealed that Valve employees have occasionally trolled hopeful gamers with hoaxes for Half-Life 3.
