Team Fortress 2

What works

Everything,updating,installing,running and playing the game

What does not

Exiting the game causes x server to crash

Workarounds

What was not tested

Extended play
Direct X 9

Hardware tested

Graphics:

• GPU:
• Driver:

Additional Comments

After upgrading wine to 1.1.36 team fortress 2 ran like crap, It wasn't actually playable because of the graphics artifacting. Other then pretty horrible fps using wine 1.1.35 the game runs stable. The only crash is when exiting the game it causes the x server to crash and restart. This can be avoided by alt+tab to the desktop then closing team fortress 2. I turned everything down to low and turned my resolution down and using Direct x 8.1 override I was getting anywhere between 60-120 fps. Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 Nvidia Geforce 8800gts v92

Installing Team Fortress 2

• Use Wine-1.1.35 or newer (Steam doesn't work with older versions).
• Install TF2 via Steam or copy the data files to steamapps.
• The latest Wine version is strongly recommended.  

Detailed Configuration for Team Fortress 2

This section is Optional how ever it may greatly improve the stability and frame rate you achieve with TF2.

• Make sure sound is configured and working (test in winecfg).
• Add "-nointro" option to skip valve video. Some users report this helps to avoid initial crash.
• Run TF2 within a Virtual Desktop if you want consistent alt-tabbing.  This is done via winecfg -> Graphics -> "Emulate a Virtual Desktop".  This size should be the same as your screen resolution.
• If you are using a multi-screen setup and a Virtual Desktop you may need to enable the "Automatically capture the mouse in full-screen windows" if the mouse is escaping in your Wine version.
• Virtual Desktops can be defined on a per-application basis.

Running Team Fortress 2

Team Fortress 2 can be run from Steam or from the command line.

To start TF2 using the command line:

WINEDEBUG=-all wine ~/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/Steam/steam.exe -applaunch 440 -nointro

See Steam Official Troubleshooting and Steam Classic Troubleshooting for any issues related to Steam itself.

Team Fortress 2 crashes on scoreboard display.

This bug was introduced in a TF2 update at the start of 2010. Another update ~May 2010 is believed to have fixed it. If you are still experiencing this bug, please comment on bug #21534. There are two potential solutions.

1) The bug can be worked around by playing TF2 at a resolution with less than 1024 pixels of height.

2) A minor edit to the theme of TF2 fixes the crash consistently.

• Download and install GCFExplorer from this forum post. (Works with Wine 1.1.43, use at your own risk.)
• Extract ClientScheme.res from team fortress 2 content.gcf located in the steamapps folder (~/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/Steam/steamapps).  ClientScheme is located in /tf/resource/ within the gcf package.
• Place this file in ./steamapps/~youruser~/team fortress 2/tf/resource
• Using a text editor open ClientScheme.res and find the subsections "ScoreboardTeamScore" and "HudFontGiant" and change the font type from 'TF2' to 'Verdana' in sub-definitions '4' and '5' for both sections.

Thanks to rasmus.ry for posting this.  More information is available in bug #21534.

In the most cases, this bug is caused by the Steam In-Game Overlay, to solve Open your winecfg, go to Libraries, add a new Library called gameoverlayrender and set to disabled, the Steam In-Game Overlay and screenshot will not work.

Note: Also solved by properly compiled Wine with supported gcc versions.

If you can connect to some servers and not others consistently it is most likely caused by the MOTD displayed at the start of any match.  This can disabled for all servers via the in-game options.

Options -> Multiplayer -> Advanced -> Disable MOTD (checkbox).

This also happens with some languages has some symbols that Wine can't handle and Team Fortress 2 is a game that is full translated, so, when you connect some servers the engine load this fonts and crash TF2, to solve-it just set language of Steam to english, all the games will be english. This bug happens with portuguese, but, can happen with other languages as well.

Unfortunately there are many reasons for these crashes.  Try reducing screen resolution, lover video settings (shadow, textures quality, etc).  If the bug is consistent please consider reporting it or filing a bug report if one doesn't already exist.

See bug #23578. Valve updated their anti-cheat code with the Engineer update and WINE did not handle this well. This bug also affected at least some other games launched from Steam. There is a fix for this in git after 21 July 2010. All 1.3.x versions should contain this fix. 1.2 does NOT contain this fix, but the patch applies cleanly to the 1.2 source. 1.2.1 does contain this fix, so the most recent stable or the most recent development versions should just both work fine now.

This is caused by the new implementation of mouse input in wine, to solve-it, you need to run the game in Windowed mode or into a Virtual Desktop.

Thanks to Frozen Fox and others, this bug has another solution that is download and install a Wine version to before than 1.3.20 (because this is the version that was set the new mouse implementation).

Download here the Source for Wine 1.3.19.

Note: This bug was solved in the newset versions of wine.

This bug is related with the last Team Fortress update and some nvidia video cards, you can solve it by adding -nod3d9ex at the launch option into the game, to do that, right click at the game on steam, go to Proprieties and click into Set Launch Options.

If Team Fortress 2 crash and you can't solve, you can try these steps:

• Add "-dxlevel 81" to the TF2's launch options. This option is need for the first run in some machines.
• Verify video drivers installed properly.  Wine is 32-bit application and requires 32-bit display driver libraries.
• Install Steam into separate WINEPREFIX to avoid conflicts.
• Set TF2's main executable "hl2.exe" to "Windows 98" version.  This is done via winecfg -> "Add application..." -> type hl2.exe in the filename box -> click open -> select hl2.exe in the "Application Settings" list and change "Windows Version" to "Windows 98".
• Close Steam, verify that Wine is not running. To force Wine to exit use 'wineserver -k' command. If this doesn't work manually kill all Wine processes except wineserver.
• Make sure sound is working properly in Wine.
• Run TF2 in full-screen mode, window mode might cause crashes.  Use a virtual desktop if required.
• Check integrity of Steam data files.  To really be sure no files are corrupt remove "Program Files/Steam/steamapps/team fortress 2" directory (save configs first) and let Steam rebuild it.

Right on-time for holidays Valve delivers!

As of December 19 Team Fortress 2 available as native Linux application to anyone!

Valve's post on Steam for Linux forum.

The Steam for Linux beta program is now open to the public! In order to participate in the beta, you must download the latest Steam Linux client (found here) or upgrade your existing Steam for Linux client to the latest version.
In addition, we will now track Steam for Linux client bugs using GitHub. This provides a better interface for tracking bugs than the forums used in the closed beta. The Steam for Linux repository (currently empty) is public, allowing anyone with a free GitHub account to create a new issue and edit or track it and search the existing bug database. The repository contains a readme file (README.md) detailing how to create a new issue (it describes the same format used in the closed beta).
The team will continue working through existing issues in the forum but it is strongly recommended that any new issues be entered using GitHub's issue tracking interface. The sub forums will remain open so that people can join/continue existing discussions about the Steam for Linux client.
And last but not least, we now have a steam installer package repository. There is a mailing list for announcing updates to the steam installer package. To subscribe, use the public mailman page located here: https://list.valvesoftware.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/steamrepo.

Installing on non-Ubuntu distros

• Download steam_latest.deb file.
• Extract steam_latest.deb's content (you need to have dpkg-deb program)

  dpkg-deb -xv steam_latest.deb /tmp/steam

• Extract install launcher into directory where you want Steam to be installed. This is where Steam and all of it's data files will be. Make sure you have enough space for all future games. Here I'm using "Steam" in HOME directory:

  tar xJf /tmp/steam/usr/lib/steam/bootstraplinux_ubuntu12_32.tar.xz -C ~/Steam

• Launch Steam let it update then sign up and download TF2!

  ~/Steam/steam.sh

• Enjoy!