Today marks the official public release of a small script that I made to ease the pains in setting up a Mann vs. Machine match in Team Fortress 2 without going through Valve’s matchmaking process. I usually host local servers for things, and since the Mann vs. Machine interface doesn’t make such an accommodation, I took it into my own hands to give myself a painless way to do it. The script and relevant instructions are found in its Github repo, mvm-listenserver-script.

In short, the script essentially creates easy to remember aliases or commands that run a series of other commands that don’t have human friendly names or take parameters that are difficult to recollect. This allows people to spend less time trying to figure out what the command was to set the map’s difficulty and more time actually killing robots.

The script also makes use of Team Fortress 2’s built in functionality, so no external plugins or addons are required aside from the script files itself. The only risk involved in running this script would be encountering an error. Since the game is so frequently updated, the references made to the difficulty names may be broken or inaccurate in the future. Aside from that however, there are no inherent risks in running this script.

If anyone happens to want to make improvements, feel free to send them my way either on this blog or on Github and I’ll probably pull them in. I’m no master scripter, so surely there are improvements to be made! :)