You may have noticed that the legacy HLDSUpdateTool, is deprecated for a while. Since the recent udpate from Steam that forces all TF2 clients to use the new SteamPipe system, the server downloaded by HLDSUpdateTool is definitely deprecated. The Team Fortress’ wiki is giving wrong informations, that procedure is deprecated.

If you try to run a deprecated version of your server (acquired with HLDSUpdateTool), you will get one of the following :

MasterRequestRestart
Your server is out of date.  Please update and restart.

MasterRequestRestart
Server will restart on map change.

And the client is getting the following :

The server you are connecting to is running an older version of the game

You can try to update using HLDSUpdateTool but nothing will change, you will be stuck with your old version, and you will keep getting the same errors.

The key is to get the new TF2 server software, that uses SteamPipe. To do so, you have to grab the new SteamCMD program, that replaces HLDSUpdateTool, and install the TF2 server as explained in Valve documentation.

Because the documentation is not quite clear (in particular, concerning the new AppID to use), here is a few-steps tutorial to install your new TF2 server :

  • Make sure you create a new directory for SteamCMD files, do not install it in HLDSUpdateTool directory : mkdir steamcmd && cd steamcmd

  • Download SteamCMD : wget http://media.steampowered.com/client/steamcmd_linux.tar.gz

  • Extract SteamCMD : tar -xzf steamcmd_linux.tar.gz

  • If you are running a 64bit system (every decent server does), install ia32-libs (for instance, in Debian : dpkg --add-architecture i386 && apt-get install ia32-libs).

  • Run SteamCMD : ./steamcmd.sh it will update automatically.

  • Install TF2 dedicated server, in a custom directory (for me it’s the folder tf2_server in upper directory) :
    ./steamcmd.sh +login anonymous +force_install_dir ../tf2_server/ +app_update 232250 validate +quit

  • Note that the Steam AppID is now 232250 and not 440 as HLDSUpdateTool used to prompt.

  • Now you can run your new TF2 server : get back to the upper directory (cd ..) and start it :
    ./tf2_server/srcds_run -steam_dir steamcmd/ -steamcmd_script steamcmd/steamcmd.sh -console -game tf +map cp_dustbowl -maxplayers 16

Of course, you will have to copy your existing server.cfg, mapcycle, and MODs to your new TF2 installation directory (in tf2_server/tf/ sub-folders, indeed). If you have no clue of what I am talking about, please read the Team Fortress Wiki.

 

I hope this post will help those who are stuck with these “server deprecated” errors and unable to use their server. Have fun !