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Ok, I see alot of people who upload maps to their tf2 servers just as normal .bsp files, while yes that does work its not efficient, if you download 7zip you can pack the .bsp file into a .bz2 file, it is much more compressed as a file and tf2 knows what to do with it so it will auto download and extract, it all works and will really just be a lot more time saving in the long run.

wat

Quoted from Alfie

I don’t know if I’m allowed to, but I use the colonslash fastdl servers on the servers I maintain. It has all the custom maps I can think of, along with all the versions

Pretty sure spike even said to use it, so for anyone who still does not know how to do it, put this in server.cfg:

sv_downloadurl "http://fastdl.colonslash.eu/"

With that all maps that are on colonslash server will have fast download and you can message spike if you need some added.

Alternatively you can use "http://fakkelbrigade.eu/" as download url to use fakkelbrigade server.

Quoted from Spike Himself

It is called “fast download” because of the compression – it’s not a magical way to increase download speed like some people seem to think (i.e. the download is just as fast as anything else, the file you are downloading is just smaller).

I don’t mean to sound rude, but you’re wrong. Sending files from game servers is (since the Quake days) restricted to the game server’s sv_maxrate. This is why Fast Download servers appear in Quake and HL1*, neither of which supported compressed files, so that clients could download files as fast as their connection and the fastdl server’s connection could handle.

Compressed files on FastDownload servers first appeared in Unreal (I think, as .uz files) in order to decrease download times even further and have been the standard ever since.

*HL1 games gained support for transparent gzip compression in 2013… if the webserver is correctly configured, that is. However, don’t bother to compress the files on the server using gzip as that doesn’t work… the web server must compress the files on its own when sending them (and it will only do that if the appropriate server module is installed).