Birthday mode

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Revision as of 16:00, 25 August 2011 by Chocolate Rain! (talk | contribs) (Added to the quote)
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Today is a good day!
The Soldier on Birthdays

Birthday mode, also sometimes called party mode, is a server mode that enables various "silly gibs" to be used alongside the normal gibs. It is automatically activated on August 24, the release date of the original Team Fortress in 1996. It can manually be enabled on servers by using the setting tf_birthday 1 in the server.cfg file.

Many of the gibs seen in this mode are used in the low-violence version of the game as full-time replacements. A beach ball appears in BLU's spawn room at the beginning of the round and may be propelled by most attacks and the Pyro's compression blast. Health kits are replaced with birthday cakes and ammo packs are wrapped with a bow like a birthday present.

Changes

Prior to the August 23, 2011 Patch, birthday mode would automatically draw a Party Hat on top of the classes' heads. This has been moved to its own item that can be chosen like other hats. This prevents a number of clipping issues the Party Hat had with non-default hats.

Birthday mode used to completely disable the use of blood and violent gibs. Blood was replaced by balloon particles. Some violent gibs are now spawned along with presents and other silly gibs.

Scoring a critical hit used to play a cheering sound effect rather than the normal crit impact sound. This has now been moved to the TF Birthday Noisemaker.

Gallery


Gibs

Main article: Silly gibs

Birthday mode uses both normal gibs and the silly gibs that low violence versions of TF2 use.

Update history

August 20, 2010 Patch

  • Fixed bug with holiday date computation that turned on Birthday mode a few days too soon.
  • [Undocumented] Added a "Happy Birthday Team Fortress" beach ball that will randomly appear in BLU's spawn at the start of a round when Birthday mode is enabled.

August 23, 2011 Patch

  • Added TF birthday replacement models for health kits and ammo packs.
  • Added TF birthday Party Hat and Noisemaker.
  • [Undocumented] Updated the TF birthday ball to read "Happy 15th Birthday"
  • [Undocumented] The original birthday mode party hats are no longer used
  • [Undocumented] Normal gibs are now enabled along with silly gibs in birthday mode
  • [Undocumented] Balloon particles no longer replace blood in birthday mode
  • [Undocumented] Cheering sound effects no longer occur automatically in birthday mode; this has been moved to the TF Birthday Noisemaker

Trivia

  • It is possible to kill another player by propelling the beach ball towards someone at a fast enough rate, regardless of whether the player is on your team or not. When the player is killed through this method, it will appear as if that player committed suicide.
  • The model used for the large health pack is reused from the game Portal, albeit with a new texture.

See also