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I made a plugin to make spectating easier. It creates a new console command which you can bind for switching to any player in one press.

Note: It currently won’t work on players with double quotes in their names. :(

Download: http://flomp.net/spec_helper/
Source: https://github.com/miek/spectate_helper_plugin

Spectate helper plugin
======================

Install
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Extract spec_helper.dll and spec_helper.vdf to your tfaddons folder

Usage:
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This plugin adds the console command "spec_player_ex" which takes two arguments: team_id and player_index.
Team IDs are 2 for Red and 3 for Blu (and 0/1 for no team/spec but these aren't useful here).
The player index counts up from 0 and the order of players is undefined. The order will stay constant except for changes when players join or leave.

This plugin is unsigned, so will require "-insecure" on your launch options. This also means you cannot join VAC-secure servers while using this plugin. You can still join STV servers and watch demos with this plugin.

Example usage:
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bind 1 "spec_player_ex 2 0"
bind 2 "spec_player_ex 2 1"
bind 3 "spec_player_ex 2 2"
bind 4 "spec_player_ex 2 3"
bind 5 "spec_player_ex 2 4"
bind 6 "spec_player_ex 2 5"
bind 7 "spec_player_ex 3 0"
bind 8 "spec_player_ex 3 1"
bind 9 "spec_player_ex 3 2"
bind 0 "spec_player_ex 3 3"
bind - "spec_player_ex 3 4"
bind = "spec_player_ex 3 5"

Contact
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Made by Miek (mike at flomp.net)

well done

Sounds great, just be careful how you use it.

I don’t know if STV servers are VAC-enabled (doubt it), but other servers are, so to avoid a VAC ban (and after March 15th a league ban) I would suggest:

* Only connect to STV’s when using the plugin and/or the -insecure option. If you want to join a normal server afterwards, disable whatever is necessary (I imagine removing -insecure is enough) and restart TF2 to avoid the risk of a VAC ban.
* Have a separate TF2 account with the plugin installed purely for watching STV.

Remember that VAC bans are usually delayed by some amount, and if you receive a VAC ban after the 15th of March you will receive a 1-year league ban on top of it.

I’m not saying don’t use it, just be careful.

Quoted from Crasp

Sounds great, just be careful how you use it.

I don’t know if STV servers are VAC-enabled (doubt it), but other servers are, so to avoid a VAC ban (and after March 15th a league ban) I would suggest:

* Only connect to STV’s when using the plugin and/or the -insecure option. If you want to join a normal server afterwards, disable whatever is necessary (I imagine removing -insecure is enough) and restart TF2 to avoid the risk of a VAC ban.
* Have a separate TF2 account with the plugin installed purely for watching STV.

Remember that VAC bans are usually delayed by some amount, and if you receive a VAC ban after the 15th of March you will receive a 1-year league ban on top of it.

I’m not saying don’t use it, just be careful.

The issue with the FOV ones was that they had code within them to re-enable VAC even though you had the “-insecure” option.
My plugin doesn’t do any of that, and will just give you an error saying you’re in insecure mode if you try and join a VAC-secure server – so there’s no chance of getting VAC banned.

And yep, just remove “-insecure” to disable it for normal play.

Also, it doesn’t require nicks or steam IDs, you can just setup the example binds above and be done with it :)

good job mr. mike

Hmmm

I encountered a weird escaping issue when I was trying to bind a button to say a url …

bind "button" "say hello please visit http://example.com"

Would print

hello please visit http:

Or something along those lines … it was truncated somewhere around the slashes anyway.

If I put those lines in a cfg and exec’d it though, then it worked.

bind "button" "exec url"

say hello please visit http://example.com

Maybe you could try that as a workaround? You would have to create separate cfg files with the plugin for each player name though..

This got broken in a recent update, so I made a new version. Click this http://flomp.net/spec_helper/ if you would like it in your life.

Works fine with 9v9 :)
It just depends on how you setup your configs.