About

mastercomfig is a suite of various modifications and patches to the popular multiplayer game, Team Fortress 2. It’s mainly centered around a configuration file which changes various quality, optimization and gameplay settings both to the user’s preferences and desired performance/quality characteristics. The project has grown to include a web app for generating a wide variety of customizations and patches chosen for inclusion by Valve into the live game!

Background

Team Fortress 2 is one of my favorite games. It was one of my first multiplayer games I played on PC, joining after it became free to play. It was quite popular in my friend group at the time, and everyone was overjoyed to teach me more about the game. Eventually, I got into learning about what are called “performance configs”, modifications to the game to set certain internal settings through console scripting, something that goes back to the Quake professional days. I first used “Chris’ config” one of the older but still popular configs at the time, before moving on to “Comanglia’s config”, which was the newest, most popular standard. Over time, curiosity got the best of me and I started looking into various things that were in the config.

I started to find more and more discrepancies and incorrect settings, further encouraged by comments Valve had made that I found in my research, including in a 2015 patch note: “Fixed two most common forms of framerate stuttering / hitching when using popular FPS configs”. Why were these FPS configs causing stuttering and worse performance? It comes down to discrepancies between how setting variables are named and what they actually do. Some things may sound great, they might sound like they fix load stutters, or simplify map geometry, but when you actually look into the internal functions of these variables, they do the exact opposite.

So, I started to make my own, definitive, highly researched FPS config, according to Valve comments and my experience with programming, which I named TF2CFG. I shared it with my friends, who enjoyed the greater FPS boosts it gave, without needing to sacrifice quality as much as the traditional ones did. I was much too shy to really release it to the public, but after much pushing by my friends, and a much too clever suggestion on a new name by one of them, in 2017 I released “mastercomfig”, a play on words with my username and the word “config”. I never really wanted to associate the config with myself, like what had been done by other config makers, because I wanted this to be a central repository for the whole community’s knowledge. However, mastercomfig was too cute and clever of a name to resist.

Eventually, mastercomfig went from a basic list of settings to a full config scripting framework. This eventually made way for the mastercomfig web app, which allows users to easily customize quality settings and other preferences, as well as expanding into other aspects of the game like advanced keyboard and mouse binds, weapon preferences for crosshairs and effects. The core of the config also improved over time, gaining new functionality and optimizations much beyond any other config by clever use of internal functionality and undocumented behavior of the game and its engine. And even more, mastercomfig became a project to optimize and improve the game itself. To date, there have been dozens of changes from mastercomfig included by Valve into the live game, going back to 2020 and some of them as recent as 2023. These updates touch into various exploit patches, fixes for the automated cheater bots that have plagued TF2 for a few years, and performance improvements! And an even a greater set of patches submitted at Valve’s request is on the way! There’s large engine optimizations and huge gameplay fixes being reviewed.

Experience

To say I learned a lot from this project would be selling it short. Having an opportunity to be this close to Valve technology like the Source Engine has taught me a lot not only at a technical level, but also from a game design and shipping perspective. I’ve learned the gospel of the playtest, of de facto intent through bugs that turn into features, and how things don’t have to be perfect to be perfect for the user. That being said, I did also learn a lot of technical stuff:

• C++
• Protobufs
• Threading algorithms: work stealing, thread scheduling, lockless algorithms
• Instruction optimization: SSE2 instrinsics, compiler assembly output optimization, prediction optimization
• Low level threading: pthreads, Windows synchronization events/objects and critical
• Networking: loss/latency compensation, buffer management
• Profiling: contention, distribution, lock convoys, I/O optimization, graphics driver and graphics interface optimization
• Graphics programming: HLSL, DirectX

And on the mastercomfig web app side, I certainly learned a lot of new tricks:

• Web frameworks: Astro, React, Vite
• Global web services: serverless functions with sub-millisecond process time, CDN and routing optimization, preloading
• Modern web app features: flexbox, lazy loading, hydration
• PWAs: filesystem APIs, notifications, offline support

Finally, mastercomfig is a community as much as it is a technical project. I learned from an open-source maintainership perspective, as well as a more casual aspect with moderating its Discord server. I both focused on efforts to keep the community safe and friendly through bot configuration and diligent moderation, and also making it a fun place for people to interact about not just mastercomfig or even just TF2. Now, it feels like a big community which chats about really anything, with quality conversations, lots of fun hang out sessions and game nights, as well as neat events we do throughout the year. It’s really the first time I managed a public community like this, and I have much to thank gdude for his work on the Glowstone community, which I learned from, as well as the patient communities who tolerated the many mistakes I made managing other, more specialized communities, like my MMORPG Minecraft server.