Setting up a TF2 server for a UGC team

This guide assumes you own a server hosted on a website like End of Reality or Art of War Central. There is documentation elsewhere for dedicated servers.

The most basic thing you have to know how to do in order to make any changes to your server is to connect to it with FTP (File transfer protocol). You can use the in browser FTP client that is on your server's hosting website, or an application like filezilla. The in browser client is fine for most things, but if you have multiple large uploads it might be a good plan to use filezilla, which won't cancel them if you accidentally close your browser.

To log into filezilla, use the username and password you use to log in to the in browser, and the IP listed on the main page. It will be the server's ip but with a different port. Put that in the "Host" field at the top, and then your username in password in the correct fields.

You can probably find plenty of tutorials on using filezilla, but the basic idea is, to upload something, find it on your hard drive on the left and find where you want to put it on the server on the right. Double click and it will upload. Clicking on the opposite side will download the file. Right clicking and choosing "View/Edit" lets you edit text files.

Using the in-browser FTP is the same idea. If you want to upload a file, choose upload from the top and find the files. If you want to download something, find the download button next to it.

Once you have gotten into the server files, you will see two folders, hl2 and orangebox. You will not need to use anything in hl2 for this guide. It is all textures and models and sound for the game itself. In orangebox, there is a folder named tf, which is the one you will be working with.

Now that you can access files in the server, you will need the files to upload. Download everything to your computer first, the maps and the configs. It is probably a good idea to make a folder for all of them so things don't get too messy.

For UGC 6v6, the files are here. For Highlander, the files are here.

Keep all of the files named exactly what they are on that page. Decompress all the map For the whitelists you'll have to right click > save as and save it as a .txt file. Having both the 6s and HL files on the server at the same time is not only okay but necessary if you have both teams, as they are different.

Upload the maps to the orangebox/tf/maps folder, and put them in your computer's maps folder. (C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\steamname\team fortress 2\tf\maps\ ). This step is necessary for everyone who would like to join your server, if you do not have fast downloads set up. In this guide those will not be covered, but they are what allow you to download the map when you connect to a server running a map you don't already have.

Put the config files and the whitelist into the oranegbox/tf/cfg folder.

Now that you have the files in the correct places, you need to know how to use them in-game. If you are familiar with rcon commands, all you need to know is rcon exec config_name is used to execute the config files, and rcon changelevel map_name to change the map. If you aren't, here is a more in depth explanation.

Rcon is short for remote console, and it is how you interact with the server from inside your game, using the console (If you haven't enabled this, go to options > keyboard > advanced and enable the developer console), which you bring up by pressing the ` or ~ key. Any commands directed at the server rather than your game have to start with rcon. Before using any rcon commands you have to type in the rcon password by typing rcon_password your_password. If you're not sure about what that password is, look in the server's orangebox/tf/cfg/server.cfg file (open with notepad). See what the variable rcon_password is set to.

If you go to the in-browser main page, there is  a section with the config files all in one place so you don't have to go looking through the cfg folder. Just find the server.cfg file in there and edit it. They are the same.

So, type in the password, then execute the configs with rcon exec config_name. Because of sourceTV you need to change the map after doing that. Source TV is something that allows people to spectate a game without having to be on the server. It also lets you record a demo of everything that happened instead of one person's point of view. The sourceTV bot that joins spectate only joins once the map has been changed. To change the map, type rcon changelevel map_name. if you are already on the map you want to be on, then just change to the same map; it will reload it.

The config files set up the server to automatically record a demo once the match starts. Once it is over, and you've executed ugc_off, the demo will stop recording. It will be named according to the format "auto-date-time-map_name.dem", and will be in the server's orangebox/tf folder. To play it on your computer, download the file and put it in your computer's C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\steamname\team fortress 2\tf folder. Open team fortress 2 and in the console type demoui (pressing shift+f2 will do the same thing), choose load, and select the demo file with the right name. Alternatively, typing playdemo demoname works, but the other way is better if the name is unweildly or you don't remember it. Once the demo has loaded, close the demoui box to be able to control the camera.

After the match is over, you might also want to look at the log files for statistics about kills, deaths and ubers and a few other things. They are located in the server's orangebox/tf/logs folder. The names are fairly meaningless, so go by the date they were last modified, and look for the one larger than about 150,000 bytes. To get the information from the logs into a readable form, upload the file to a website like logs.tf.

The  final thing you will want to do before having a match is to set a password on the server. This can be done by going into the server.cfg file from earlier, that you used for the rcon password. In it there will be a variable sv_password "". If there is not, put sv_password "yourpassword" into the file somewhere. This requires a map change to take effect.