CSS (and maybe CSGO too, idk): Surf TASing without any programming knowledge

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I'll start off by saying that if you have the ability to make your own TAS plugin, you should just do it if you want to TAS. The plugin that I'm going to talk about, while not that bad, is a bit clunky sometimes, and lacks a few features critical to surf since it was made for rocket jumping in TF2. It runs and works fine, though.

With that said, let's get in to it.

The Plugin

Download link taken directly from nolem's thread on jump.tf: https://www.dropbox.com/s/ajghmvcgfnu62x0/tas.dll?dl=0

The plugin was made by nolem over on jump.tf. It has a nice bit of features, such as checkpoints, its own HUD, and a function to show the path of the demo. The tutorial to install it is in his post, just substitute "CSS" for all instances of "TF2". You will still need to install Metamod first, so click here for that. Extract the .zip from the metamod site into your cstrike folder. You should now have a folder called addons, which is where you'll put the tas.dll.

NOTE THAT THIS PLUGIN'S AUTOMATIC DEMO RECORDING DOES NOT WORK SINCE IT'S NOT IN A /TF/ FOLDER. YOU WILL HAVE TO SAVE AND RECORD YOUR OWN DEMOS AND TIME IT BY THE TICK COUNT.

Using it

I think the easiest way to use the plugin is to create a .cfg to load whenever you want to TAS. However, to begin, you're going to need to open Steam and edit the launch properties of CSS. You're going to need to add "-insecure" to the launch parameters, because the plugin will not work otherwise. This is to prevent people from using it in any online games. To add "-insecure" to the launch properties, right click on CSS and then click on properties.

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After that, click "Set launch options..."

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Then, finally, add "-insecure" after any other launch options you may already have set and click "Ok".

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Now, launch the game and start up a local server on any map you want by opening your console and typing "map surf_mapname" and just wait for it to load. When it's done loading, open your console again and type "meta load addons/tas" to load the tas plugin. Then, load up any of the tas hud options you want to use, familiarize yourself with the meat of the tas plugin, lower that host_timescale, and get tas'ing.

For reference, here are all the commands you can use after you load the tas plugin through metamod. Taken exactly from nolem's jump.tf post:
tas record - Starts recording
tas stop - Stops recording / playing
tas play - Plays recording from beginning
tas frame save - Adds a checkpoint at the current tick (works when recording or playing back)
tas frame goto - Teleports you to your last checkpoint and begins overwriting the recording from there
tas frame delete - Deletes your last checkpoint
tas rewind - Rewinds to ticks before the current tick during playback or while recording - always starts playing from here - doesn't rewind then start recording
tas frame_count - Toggle tick number counting to console
tas show_path - Toggles showing the path + additional info
tas hud - Toggles the hud
tas save - Saves run to file with name tf/addons/runs/*MAPNAME*-.recording
tas load - Loads run from file with name tf/addons/runs/*MAPNAME*-.recording
tas list - Lists all runs on a map in /runs




Now, what are the big problems with this plugin? Well, the no bhopping and the fact you have to time by ticks. You also cannot use cl_showpos 1 with the tas hud for some reason, but the tas hud isn't that critical. Also, if you want to TAS a tickrate other than whatever CSS's default tickrate, you're no your own. I haven't used this really and haven't ever really set up my own server, whether local or on another machine, so I don't know if you can allow -insecure clients to connect on a private server with a non-default tickrate. More information can be found on nolem's post, so if my short little explanation wasn't very good, look there next. If anyone else already released a dedicated surf TAS plugins, oh well, use those since chances are they're better than this.

Have fun :^)

Also sorry if this topic would fit better somewhere else