In my spare time, actually more time than I care to admit to, I play a lot of Team Fortress 2. I enjoy playing this game very much. I meet lots of interesting people with common interests: gaming, first person shooters and team work. Quite some time ago the game creators started a weapon/item drop system. With this system every so often the possibility of a hat or a weapon can randomly be given to a player (the drop rates can be found on other TF2 specific websites). Personally I was against the idea as soon as it was implemented mainly because it negated the need for obtaining these items through the achievement method which was already established a while back by the game creators. With the achievement method, the game creators have a set of “milestones” to be achieved by completing specific tasks (achievements). As an example, a demo man achievement (one of many) is to destroy all of an engineers buildings and the engineer himself with one single sticky bomb detonation (can be more than one sticky bomb laid out detonated at the same time). If you were able to accomplish this feat you would acquire the achievement. After a certain number of various achievements were obtained you would reach an achievement milestone and were awarded a new weapon. There are 3 milestones for each class in the game allowing you to get whatever new weapon for each milestone obtained. They also created funny looking neat hats for people to wear which are dropped to players on a totally randomized system based on game time played.

Then, to make matters worse, they created an item crafting system which allowed you to craft items from the excess items which are dropped to you during normal game play. They created blueprints which need to be followed to create either weapons or hats. I believe the idea is to allow people to craft weapons/hats which they would like to have by “smelting” items into scrap metal, etc. As an example if you crafted three same class weapon items you can get one scrap metal, three scrap metals can get you one reclaimed metal and 3 reclaimed metals got you one refined metal which with 3 more refined metals and what they call a class token which is created by refining 4 items of a specific class will allow you to craft a hat for that specific class which you made the class token from. There are MANY more blueprints for hats and I am not going to cover them all (too many websites out there already have Google it). This creates a blueprint in which you need 112 dropped items in order to create one class specific hat. Taking into consideration the default drop rate it would take you a ridiculous amount of game play hours just to get one class specific hat (it took me almost three months for the above mentioned hat, and I play too much).

Now we are getting to the crux of this ridiculous system and why I am creating this post. In an effort to get more items for crafting you can find idle servers where you can just sit in a room and slowly your life will be drained until you die, respawn and do it over again and again and again. This occurs for as long as you are on the server. The longer you are on an idle server, just like a standard sever, the more item drops you have the possibility of obtaining. The difference is that no one is kicked from an idle server for being away from keyboard (AFK) and you can just walk away from the game. I do this quite often now because I want to obtain certain items, specifically cool looking hats for all my classes like the ones I see other people with. The makers of TF2 seem to be extremely stingy with hat drops at least to this user. I have had maybe 4 hats for 3 different classes dropped to me since the inception of their drop system, pretty lame.

While I am idling on a server, my game remains on the screen maximized and gets in the way of other things I wanted to do while it was idling. Sure I can alt + tab or click “Show the Desktop” and change focus to another item on my desktop or the desktop itself but eventually the game would take focus again when I tried to open another program. So I needed a way to hide the game and then show the game at my will.  I run two monitors on my system and I run the game in windowed mode and with the border removed (-noborder command in the startup properties) to facilitate easy quick switching to other programs like messenger during game play without the game having to minimize and then maximize as this takes a long time and sometimes you time out of servers or get kicked out due to client/server network timeout. TF2 just doesn't handle minimizing/maximizing gracefully and you can get anomalies in your graphics too afterwards.

This was not in any way desirable to me. So I created a little program which would hide or show the TF2 game at my will. The game still runs in the background hidden (you can tell by seeing that you continue to have network traffic) and allows you to do whatever you want on your computer without being bothered by the idling game you are running. You can then show the game again and it will pop right back up, no worries. Better living through better programming.

I offer this program to anyone whom wishes to use it. It is free, no charge. I will say one thing though using this program (TF2-Idler Manager) is issued as is with no warranties written or implied so use it at your own risk. It uses the .NET framework (make sure you have the latest .NET 3.5 installed) so if you have a windows system chances are it will work. I compiled and run it on a Windows 7 system as does a gaming friend of mine who also runs Windows 7. This program also does NOTHING to TF2 so you wont be singled out by them and have something taken away. Idling is perfectly legal and on any day you can see hundreds of people doing so. All I am doing is hiding the screen or showing it, nothing more.

To use TF2-IdlerManager start up TF2 get on your favorite idle server Alt-Tab out of the TF2 screen (Setting TF2 to Windowed Mode is recommended) and start up the TF2-IdlerManager. The rest is self explanatory.

Also, I will be updating the program regularly. So come back for a new version often.

Note! By clicking the link below, downloading and using TF2-Idler Manager you are automatically agreeing to the following: This program (TF2Idler Manager) is issued as is with no warranties written or implied. Use it at your own risk.

New Update 10/11/2010:

I am creating a ReadMe.txt file with details on the program and will publish it seperately. Look for the link here soon!

There is a seperate 32 bit (x86) and 64 bit (x64) installer for the TF2IdlerManager Program.

There is also a DirectX installation packaged with the program. It will automatically begin installation. THIS MUST BE INSTALLED or don't bother installing the TF2IdlerManager program because it will fail without the DirectX installaion (It will NOT in any way interfere with any drivers you have currently installed for your system).

NOTE!!! You MUST run TF2 in WINDOWED MODE for the screen shots to show up properly. Failure to run TF2 in WINDOWED MODE will result in black screen shot images. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!!!

Choose the correct version for your system below:

Download TF2Idler Manager 32 bit (x86) Installer.

Download TF2Idler Manager 64 bit (x64) Installer.