Garm3n VIP-Quad

Garm3n built HUDs for individual competitive players — VIP-<handle>, one per player, deliberately stripped of the furniture a consumer HUD carries. VIP-Quad was built for Christian “quad” Sørensen, a Danish Scout who won Insomnia43 and Insomnia44 back to back with the two dominant European rosters of that era.

Upstream stopped moving in 2023, and the main menu was last touched in 2018. This fork picks it up.

The fork target is the game, not the parent repo

This fork is even with upstream, so there is nothing to pull. “What needs updating” means diffing the HUD against the shipped game — extracting resource/ and scripts/ from the installed tf2_misc_dir.vpk and comparing. The game is the moving target; the archive is not.

Done so far: the ClientScheme font gaps closed, the scoreboard’s stats block grown to fit a Damage/Support row, the main-menu tooltips layered so they draw over the menu instead of under it, and a missing item-effect meter added that had been spamming the console.

Rot detection reports a delta, not a list of gaps

Run absolutely, the checker finds 275 differences against stock — and nearly all of them are the original author stripping decoration on purpose in 2017. From a single snapshot, “Valve added this” and “the author removed this” are indistinguishable: both are a block in stock that is not here.

Change over time is distinguishable. So the checker records the known gap set and reports only what is new since. A tool that cries 275 times is a tool nobody reads.

Each remaining gap is then scored against other HUDs — and the useful comparison turned out to be Garm3n’s own VIP line rather than the big maintained consumer HUDs. HudTournament.res scored 30 of 30 against rayshud, flawhud and budhud, the strongest signal the tool ever produced, and it was fine: those HUDs style the panel because a public release styles everything. Five of Garm3n’s six VIP HUDs don’t. A high score means “differs”, not “broken.”

Two reversals, kept on the record

The decisions log carries the mistakes at full length, because a decision made for a good reason is indistinguishable from an arbitrary one once the conversation is gone.

Animation load order. I diagnosed the manifest as broken — custom animations listed before stock, therefore overwritten — “fixed” it, and thereby created the defect I had described. TF2 keeps the first definition. Three actively maintained HUDs load custom first and demonstrably have working pulses; the revert was then confirmed in-game by building an ÜberCharge and watching the meter flash.

Declaring stock panels. I argued that a panel the client builds but the .res never names keeps its constructor geometry, so every unwanted panel must be explicitly zeroed. It crashed the game. A partial declaration is more dangerous than no declaration, because the engine trusts what the file says the control contains.

Both were settled by evidence rather than argument, and the second one was found by bisection.

The instrument that actually resolves this

Repeatedly, the only thing that could answer a question was a person loading the mode and looking at it. The scoreboard gaps, the tournament panel, the animation revert — each was decided that way after coordinate reasoning had been self-consistent and wrong. One case was cracked by setting a panel’s fill colour to bright red to find out which panel it even was.

Attribution

The HUD is Garm3n’s design — his name, his fonts, his visual identity. Everything in the repository before this fork is Hypnootize’s compatibility work, who kept most of the old HUD archive loading through years of TF2 updates and wrote the update guide this fork’s checklist is mapped onto. Not affiliated with Valve, and it ships no Valve-authored assets.

The emblem on this page is a Team Fortress 2 style logo by PD Balthazar, released into the public domain via Wikimedia Commons. It is fan-made and not an official Valve asset.