Servers.tf (SVTF for short) is a browser-based server browser for Source games such as Team Fortress 2 and Garry's Mod. The goal is to be able to index servers so that far more sophisticated searches can be made than what is currently possible with the current Source/Steam server browser.

Ideally SVTF will be able to detect mods being ran by the server and be aware of community-made game modes (e.g. Balloon Race or Surfing) so that the user can perform richer searches to find more specific servers.

The entire SVTF application is encapsulated by a single Python package: serverstf. This package includes all the services needed to get a working SVTF instance.

Python 3.4 is needed to run SVTF. It's advisable to install the package in editable mode into an isolated environment, e.g. using virtualenv.

$ virtualenv -p $(which python3) env
$ . env/bin/activate
$ pip install -e .[development]

Note that [development] will ensure that development dependencies will also be installed along side core packages. This includes things like Pylint which can be used to check the Python source. Installing these extra packages isn't strictly necessary as long as you're certain you won't need them -- e.g. you're just adding a map image.

The SVTF user interface is primarily written using CoffeeScript and has a number of external dependencies. These can be installed using npm and bower with Grunt being used to manage compilation of scripts and stylesheets.

In order to scale map images you need to have ImageMagick installed and available on your $PATH. In the following example apt-get is used to install ImageMagick, adapt for your own platform as necessary.

$ apt-get install imagemagick
$ npm install
$ node_modules/.bin/bower install
$ node_modules/.bin/grunt

It is advisable to use the watch Grunt task when actively working on the user interface. Note that watch will not automatically rebuild map images for you as it's quite slow. You can do that manually with the image_resize task.

The serverstf package includes a small Pyramid application served via Waitress which runs the UI. As with all SVTF services the UI server can be started by running the serverstf package with a subcommand.

$ python -m serverstf ui 9000
$ xdg-open http://localhost:9000/

Map images are displayed in search results and in the server details dialogue. Which image is displayed depends on the map currently in-play by the server. Adding new map images is a relatively simple process; all the configuration lives in serverstf/ui/:

1. Add the image to images/maps/masters/ in the directory that corresponds to the game the map is used for and with the extension .jpg.
2. Add appropriate .svtf-map(...) entries to styles/maps.less.
3. Add or update an entry in data/map-images.yaml.
4. Run grunt to make sure everything works.

Note that each image must be a JPEG with an aspect ratio of 16:9 and no smaller than 1920x1080. The images should also only contain the map it self. No characters, action or extraneous artefacts which are not native to the map it self (e.g. no blood spatters or bullet holes). In addition to this the image should be more or less completely unaltered; no colour correction.

Exemptions can be made on a case-by-case basis if they can be justified. For example, generic images for game modes.