get in the game!

You see that bozo on the right? That's you. That's your poor, barely-hatted soul, stuck with horse blinds and trying to figure out how much damage your sentry is doing. You're laughable, a big galoot making everything harder for yourself, and now you're dead. You big, dead, smelly dolt.

But that strapping gentleman on the left, clad in the finest of class and camera-beard technologies? That man knew precisely where he was looking at, and he is very well aware of that knife now permanently etched into your spine doing several thousand health points.

This genius of both fashion and combat has something you don't: the knowledge of customization, that he has tinkered to his heart's content. Let's show you how to stop that horrid Gibus from tainting your mind!

GET YOUR CONSOLE UP!

Click on your options in-game
In the "Keyboard" tab, click on "Advanced..."
Check "Enable developer console" on

If "Fast weapon switch" isn't also checked, you should check that.

Press the tilde (~) key in-game, and you're good to go!

This tends to be above your tab key, or to the left of your number row. It might also look like this weird thing, which according to the many wonders of google is called a "grave". What a weird thing.

man! i sure understood, like, two words in that box i popped up.

Now, now, don't freak out or anything. All you need to know for now is this: You can type in commands at the bottom, in that little box there. These commands consist of basically anything you can do in-game with your keys, but more importantly, commands are also used for every single setting in the game, even the ones not visible in your settings menu!

For future formatting, anything you see that looks like this...

echo VIDEOGAMES ARE PRETTY GREAT YOU GUYS

...You'll know that's a command, and you can copy and paste it into your console! Try it with the one above; the "echo" command just shows whatever you type afterwards in the console display (that big ol' screen above your input), so that command will let your console know just how good videogames are.

so, let's begin with your FOV!

As a quick note: you can get to most of these options in your "Adv. Options" you see in your menu... but the advanced options menu is pretty infamously terrible and bloated, so you probably shouldn't.

If you don't want to go with any other command, you should at least make sure this one is set:

fov_desired 90

"FOV" here refers to your Field Of View, which is how much you're able to see at once in degrees (so "90" here means 90 degrees around). As a general rule, you want the highest FOV possible in an FPS, which is "90" in TF2.

Fun fact: this changes your overall FOV, but how wide your screen is raises your horizontal FOV slightly (up to a point). It's highly recommended that you set your resolution is 16:9 as a result, since you'll be able to see more.

Also, there's a few scenarios where having less FOV might be preferred... but we'll show you how to switch between those two on-the-fly later!

So, you now have the best view you can have! But wait a sec, now your gun looks a bit awkward... What's going on there? Well, your viewmodel (the bit that's showing you holding your weapon) is actually technically seperate from what you're looking at, so we need to make those look prim and proper again.

viewmodel_fov 70

The command above (at 70) is considered more comfortable to most people, but you should experiment with the number to find what you think is comfortable to look at.

Your viewmodel can get pretty silly, if you want. Don't sweat it too hard, though, this is mostly aesthetical preference.

Or, hey, if you have a life-threatening grudge against the gun you're holding, you can just turn it off as you please:

r_drawviewmodel 0

Who the hell needs to see a gun, anyways. WE DON'T NEED YOU, VIEWMODELS, WE'RE INDEPENDENT NEWBIES.

next, let's go see how much damage you're doing!

A spy swinging wildly into a medic's face does about 40 damage, assuming the netcode doesn't decide that the medic's back is now located firmly on his forehead. How do I know this, you ask? Why, with the mighty power of: