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Valves Tracker - March 7 - 2002
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By Garmer
This writing won't focus on all the updates/changes in Counter-Strike 1.4
since there are plenty of other articles doing just this. Instead it will take a closer look
on the new interesting software from Valve known as "Tracker".
 | | Instant messaging |
Tracker was included in the second 1.4 beta released on February 27 and has several similarities
with ICQ, it's just more extensive and more related to gaming of course. Tracker allows you
to add friends to your list and see their current status which can be offline/online/busy/away/in-game.
The force of this software is that it works inside Half-Life meaning that you can send messages to your
friends even when they play. Of course a message won't pop up in your face in the same moment you have
an enemy centered in your sniperscope - instead you'll hear a discreet sound, and you can open Tracker
in the game anytime you wish by pressing F1. It's also possible to configure it to play sounds
on certain events such as a friend going online or joining a game.
Besides the instant messaging Tracker offers some very useful gamefeatures.
 | | Server info in Tracker |
First of all you can get info about the server where your friend is playing including
name, IP, map, playercount, latency and you can join the server with just one click.
Valve has even implemented a complete server browser which can locate available servers
and sort them by latency, map, game etc. You can also add servers to your 'favorites' list and
there's plenty of filter possibilities as well to find the server that suits you best - very convenient.
Players that you currently have on your buddylist will have a small Tracker icon
on the scoreboard. You can see the icon in-game and on the Windows toolbar below:
As mentioned earlier this is the very first version of Tracker released to public betatesting and
for this reason there's a couple of issues. The primary problem is that you're able to communicate
with your friends through Tracker, even though one of you is dead - this enables the possibility of ghosting.
There's two ways to prevent it:
1) Use forcechasecam on the server. This is the obvious solution allthough it affects
the game negatively. In these cheatingdays it can be annoying not being able to spec that
guy who fragged you mysteriously three times in a row.
2) An alternative would be to make it impossible to communicate through Tracker
with dead players (but only when you're on the same server) - or even better; que the messages
so the player would receive them next round. This would propably be the optimal solution.
As you might have noticed, Tracker is incredibly ugly - it even beats the standard Winamp skin .
Fortunately a guy messed around with some .res files in the Tracker directory and discovered the ability
to change layout and colors - as a result there's already a couple of custom Tracker skins in circulation.
Screenshots can be seen below accompanied by download links for those of you that currently use Tracker - instructions
are included in the 'white.zip' file (remember to backup your files!).
 
Download 'White' skin for Tracker (266 KB - instructions on how to install included)
Download 'Matrix' skin for Tracker (8 KB)
There are a few other issues such as international caracters missing and the missing option
of binding Tracker to another key than F1, but they're all minor and will most likely be fixed before final release.
Last thing worth mentioning is the use with HLTV. Often when you watch a game on HLTV
chat is disabled, and when it's enabled there's too many messages to communicate with one specific person.
With Tracker you can view that HLTV match and discuss it
with those people you wish - excactly what HLTV needed.
Tracker in-game showing the server
browser and the buddy list
There's no doubt that Tracker has come to stay. I find the features very usefull allthough
some things need to be polished along with some bugfixes. Nevertheless I find Tracker
one of the best additions to CS in quite some time and can assure you that it is worth
looking forward to...
You can e-mail me at Garmer@cs-extreme.net for comments, suggestions or something third.
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