Sven Co-op Client And Server Support

Introduction

This is LentoMan's Sven Co-op player guide teaching you how to configure your Sven Co-op so that you can enjoy it more as a player. To clarify, when I am talking about the \svencoop\ folder in this guide, I really mean your folder called:

\Steam\SteamApps\steamaccountname\half-life\SvenCoop\

Custom Sprays/Logos

So you've seen people running around spraying cool logos but your own spray is just a plain old one color standard logo. I am not going to tell you how to make your own logo, but I will tell you how to install one.

First you need to get hold of a spraylogo or make one yourself, you can find them all over the web on various spray sites. For now, I will provide you with an example one I made here: tempdecal.zip

After downloading you need to extract the .wad file and make sure it is called tempdecal.wad

Spraylogos used to be called pldecal.wad but valve changed this in one of their steam updates. Next you must move your tempdecal.wad to your main svencoop folder.

So move or copy your tempdecal.wad to your folder called:

\SvenCoop\

Now right click the tempdecal.wad in your svencoop folder and choose properties, make it read only. This will prevent the file from being overwritten, which seems to happen alot these days. All you need to do now is to make sure that your config.cfg has two lines called:

cl_allowupload "1"
cl_allowdownload "1"

You can edit config.cfg with notepad, or type the commands in the ingame console.

It will usually take some seconds for your spray to upload to a server, so first time you spray after entering a server it might not show up. Just wait a few minutes and spray again. Unfortunately, sprays will probably not work on servers that have uploading/downloading disabled.

If you start your own server make sure you have these lines in your server.cfg or listenserver.cfg:

sv_allowupload "1"
sv_sendlogos "1"
sv_allowdownload "1"

Configuration Files

Configuration files ends with the .cfg extension and can be found in your main \svencoop\ folder they are regular text files that can be opened and edited with plain text editors such as notepad. They contain settings that the engine will set at various points, when starting the game, when changing maps etc.

Some of the settings in the configuration files are there to set up your client, others are settings for the server. You can manually change most of the settings in the ingame-console at anytime. Changing the server settings really won't do anything unless you are running a LAN game, or are using rcon (remote console) to set them on another server.

Onto the files, the config.cfg file in your \svencoop\ folder contains next to all settings from the options screen ingame, but also a few others parameters. The file contains such things as your nickname, the type of model you are using, keyboard/mouse configuration and so on.

Once you have set up everything as you want ingame, I recommend leaving the game and making the config.cfg file read only. The reason for doing this is that there are some bad admins out there that have the ability to "slow hack" you through server plugins. By "slow hacking" means they can screw around with your settings like unbinding all your keys, changing your name or make you go slow and so on. So when you quit the game, the settings will be written to config.cfg and next time you start they will still be messed up. Remember, go to the properties of config.cfg, make it read only. They can still change your settings for the session, but they won't be written to disk, so once you restart your game you will be back to normal.

The Sven Co-op team has also provided you with a autoexec.cfg, it contains aliases and some other default settings for Sven Co-op. An alias is usually another name for a set of commands, I will tell you about them later. Aliases aren't automatically written to the config.cfg so they need to be in a separate file. I believe autoexec.cfg is only executed during startup, I am yet to verify this though.

What Next

More to come...?