Counter-Strike: Global Offensive

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http://blog.counter-strike.net/

csgo is now free to play

New plan: Massive CSGO Battle Royale map set in Venice, as part of a huge Mapcore collaboration. A shit load of us work on Venetian buildings for a month or so, and then slap them all together with a bunch of canals and bridges.

Profit.

Enjoyed the first session. Main problem maybe a bit laggy, despite the amount of things to learn it pretty well implemented (haven’t played any other BR game). I wish there was more armour and ammo so to shoot a bit more. Haven’t got used to the fact that you can regenerate health

I got a chicken dinner with @jackophant, one solo, and one with @esspho and @Squad.

Got the recordings but I’m not sure how to edit to make it interesting, is not like watching a competitive clutch.

Anyway great fun, thanks for playing guys!

My first thought when I saw the announcement was "Oh god, not another battle royale game", but having played it I think it's actually the best version of BR out there. Due to the smaller scale you get to the intense cat and mouse stuff a lot quicker than in most, and there are fewer instances of being sniped from a billion miles away by somebody you didn't even know existed.

I just hope it doesn't spell the end of traditional CS.

So how big is the map or is it just played on traditional CS maps?

Making CSGO free to play is probably a good move. It's been out for so long now anyone who was gonna buy it already has.

Quote from Beck

12 minutes ago, Beck said: So how big is the map or is it just played on traditional CS maps?

Making CSGO free to play is probably a good move. It's been out for so long now anyone who was gonna buy it already has.

It's pretty big for a source map, 20608 x 20608 units

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This plays kinda like Contagion, underrated battle royale imo.

To avoid the hard crash when loading the map you need to type in the console

game_type 6; game_mode 0; map dz_blacksite

Battle Royale in Counter-Strike. I thought I'd never see the day

Quote from Ringel

2 hours ago, Ringel said: What I really don't like about Danger Zone is the ability to cheat easily. 

You can easily cheat if you got a friend who is spectating with "watch game in progress" and provides you with all the infos you need.

You can fly around, go inside every player, see every player on the big map and you also see the names, weapons and health floating over every player on any distance. Nearby enemys also glow red, sometimes also players far away. Like here:

Otherwise the new mode is really well made.

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thats ghosting, not cheating. Also easily fixable by adding a spectator delay like they have in comp.

feels like a fresh mod, with some exciting spin on familiar gameplay

I was kinda thinking back at the game mode today and my complaint is that it doesn’t feel “CS” enough. For a new player coming into the game now, because it’s free and there’s battle royale, there’s very little they can learn and take to the classic game modes.

I wish there was more shooting, the fall damage seems too harsh, maybe we should spawn with the knife and have the tools be an upgrade, bringing back the classic feeling of “knife rounds” from pre-CSGO.

(There should also probably be a zip-line ? (maybe will be added as was mentioned in some leak for HL3/HLVR) and some other kind of environmental interaction to use.)

Where I see CSGO going now is: it either blows up, gaining users thanks to BR, but create essentially two communities due to the differences from the base game (see above), or numbers will dwindle quickly, and Valve will have to make some radical changes to bring the BR mode closer to the CS core.

See for reference this trailer for Dying Lyght: you can instantly recognise it as that game, and does seem to play on the core gameplay/strengths. Remove the UI and Danger Zone could be any mod or indie developed BR game/mode.

~

On another note, thanks to 3kliks video I realised you can throw the tools! (Great first win demo he has there as well)

Even if numbers dwindled quickly they have a bunch of content ready to go, we’ve already heard of a map enclave and I think survival island. They’ll be good for 2019 I’m sure

I agree the mode needs some tweaks and suggested on twitter making a non-random loot map for a try at a competitive version. But tbh the fact that they’ve been developing all of this content (a ton of work) and the fact that it resulted in a nice player gain, you can rest assured they’ll keep improving it.

Quote from text_fish

On 12/6/2018 at 6:41 PM, text_fish said: New plan: Massive CSGO Battle Royale map set in Venice, as part of a huge Mapcore collaboration. A shit load of us work on Venetian buildings for a month or so, and then slap them all together with a bunch of canals and bridges.

Profit.

More like an NDA and a couple of bucks for each of us. Also the optimization would be bad. The terrain in the current map looks decently attractive but the devs could have like used the warehouse from assault, the dam from cs thunder, and so on. They are complete and individually optimized while being contained for the most part. Props for theme idea though

Quote from FMPONE

4 hours ago, FMPONE said: Even if numbers dwindled quickly they have a bunch of content ready to go, we’ve already heard of a map enclave and I think survival island.

While Enclave is probably something they have on the back burner waiting for an event release, survival_island was probably an early title for blacksite or just a test map for this mode. The throw able snowballs are interesting,

maybe valve can rapid fire release both a snow and desert map in the coming months to catch up with other BR games that takes half a year to make a map with anew theme,

Quote from Ringel

13 hours ago, Ringel said: Ghosting is cheating. You get an unfair, unallowed advantage. You do not use a program but you use a human who kinda act like one. 

yeah ghosting is cheating in the same way screen peaking is cheating, except nobody who plays csgo uses the word cheating for anything that isnt program assistance.

Quote from text_fish

On 12/6/2018 at 11:41 PM, text_fish said: New plan: Massive CSGO Battle Royale map set in Venice, as part of a huge Mapcore collaboration. A shit load of us work on Venetian buildings for a month or so, and then slap them all together with a bunch of canals and bridges.

Profit.

Ah meant to say, as I was chatting with the others while playing: I believe there’s a lot of freedom in themes for this mode, and you don’t need islands. City/part of a city was a first, I was thinking how it would look a post-apocalyptic NYC theme, sort of copying The Division. But other ideas I had just during load times are a peninsula closed on 1-2 side by cliffs, you can have a desert map, a mountain top(!).

If we could figure out a way to collab I’d be interested, as my problem with mapping until now has been creating overall layouts, but small areas I could create.

~

@FMPONE reading here the additional explanation I understand what you meant on Twitter, and I can kinda see what you mean, would be a bit like RTS maps, where everybody knows we’re resources are and rush which depending on play style. Could be interesting. I wonder if they could keep the 5v5 formula on an even smaller map? Would a competitive mode be two teams or a brawl of teams? You could basically have the early elimination aspect of current tournaments in a few rounds on like 3 maps of the official mode was teams of x2 or x3.

~

Not sure if you guys had figured this out, but watching a Warowl video last night I found out that the drones follow the tablet, you can order a delivery and drop the tablet to sneak around whilst someone follows your drone! He loses the 1v1 to someone using that strat

I was thinking about a city map as well, where every skyscraper would have an additional parachute on the roof for those who land there, whilst at ground level you have 2-3 storeys accessible in some buildings. The only problem I can think with that and the Venice idea is that if you sacrifice horizontal play area for vertical play area (which you would probably need to with only 16 players) it might cause bottle-necking at the beginning of the match when everyone has to be able to select a drop point.

A desert theme might be cool, you could even throw a few classic dust elements in to areas of it, and have a large expanse of undulating dunes right in the middle so near the endgame players have to use natural elevation to their advantage.

Quote from text_fish

1 hour ago, text_fish said: A desert theme might be cool, you could even throw a few classic dust elements in to areas of it, and have a large expanse of undulating dunes right in the middle so near the endgame players have to use natural elevation to their advantage.

I’m imagining something a-la Spec-Ops The Line, and desert around just to justify not being able to go there, but guess anything can work.

~

@FMPONE had an after thought regarding the potential competitive mode with resources… instead of having it fixed according to the mapper’s design, an in-between solution could be showing on the map at load time where stuff is gonna spawn, so you keep the dynamic aspect of randomisation, but teams can decide what to do from the start.

I feel in such a bigger environment there should be some sort of randomisation, so another solution could be allowing the mapper to set where resources are, but must design it in several configurations that get randomised at the beginning of the round. Think of the classic de_havana where certain paths would be open or closed, just resource spawns would change (and again, indicated on the map at load).

Now use your Valve connections to give us exclusive access to the SDK so we can spin a studio off Mapcore just like early Gearbox did ?

Valve used "$reflect3dskybox" 1 instead of "$reflect2dskybox" 1 in island_water_01 material. It is not described by Valve, I discovered it accidentally, ehhh... Now the 3d skybox and env_sun can be reflected by water.

island_water_01:

Spoiler "Water" { "%compilewater" 1 "%tooltexture" "dev/water_normal"

//forceexpensive Must be set to 1 for Portal 2 water reflections to work. $forceexpensive 1 "$abovewater" 1 "$surfaceprop" "water" "$bottommaterial" "dev/dev_waterbeneath2" // "$normalmap" "dev/water_normal" "$normalmap" "de_nuke/hr_nuke/pool_water_normals_001"

//Go with the flow! $flowmap "hr_massive/island_water_flowmap" $flow_normaluvscale 800 $flow_worlduvscale 1 $flow_timeintervalinseconds 1 // Amount of time before the change happens $flow_uvscrolldistance .5 // Stretch of UV Distance before change over to second set of flow $flow_bumpstrength 4 $flow_timescale 1 $flow_noise_texture "liquids/water_noise" $flow_noise_scale .001 $flow_debug 0

// Reflection "$reflecttexture" "_rt_WaterReflection" "$reflecttint" "{ 200 200 200 }" "$reflectskyboxonly" 0 // "$reflectentities" 1 "$reflectonlymarkedentities" 1 // "$reflect2dskybox" 1 "$reflect3dskybox" 1 "$reflectamount" "0.9"

// Refraction $refract 1 "$refracttexture" "_rt_WaterRefraction" "$refractamount" "0.8" "$refracttint" "{ 200 200 200 }"

// Fog stuff. "$fogenable" 1 "$fogcolor" "{ 54 76 91 }" "$fogstart" -16 "$fogend" 32 $lightmapwaterfog 1

"GPU<2" { "$fallbackmaterial" "hr_massive/island_water_01_cheap" } }

island_water_01_cheap:

Spoiler "Water" { "%compilewater" 1 "%tooltexture" "dev/water_normal"

//forceexpensive Must be set to 1 for Portal 2 water reflections to work. // $forceexpensive 1 "$abovewater" 1 "$surfaceprop" "water" "$bottommaterial" "dev/dev_waterbeneath2" "$normalmap" "de_nuke/hr_nuke/pool_water_normals_001"

// Reflection "$reflecttexture" "tools/toolsblack" "$reflecttint" "{ 200 200 200 }" // "$reflectskyboxonly" 0 // "$reflectentities" 1 "$reflectonlymarkedentities" 1 // "$reflect2dskybox" 1 // "$reflect3dskybox" 1 "$reflectamount" "0.9"

// Refraction $refract 1 "$refracttexture" "_rt_WaterRefraction" "$refractamount" "0.1" "$refracttint" "{ 200 200 200 }"

// Fog stuff. "$fogenable" 1 "$fogcolor" "{ 54 76 91 }" "$fogstart" -10 "$fogend" 15 $lightmapwaterfog 1

}

island_water_01_skybox:

Spoiler "Water" { "%compilewater" 1 "%tooltexture" "dev/water_normal"

//forceexpensive Must be set to 1 for Portal 2 water reflections to work. $forceexpensive 1 "$abovewater" 1 "$surfaceprop" "water" "$bottommaterial" "dev/dev_waterbeneath2" "$normalmap" "de_nuke/hr_nuke/pool_water_normals_001"

// Reflection "$reflecttexture" "_rt_WaterReflection" "$reflecttint" "{ 200 200 200 }" "$reflectskyboxonly" 0 // "$reflectentities" 1 "$reflectonlymarkedentities" 1 "$reflect2dskybox" 1 // "$reflect3dskybox" 1 "$reflectamount" "0.9"

// Refraction $refract 1 "$refracttexture" "_rt_WaterRefraction" "$refractamount" "0.8" "$refracttint" "{ 200 200 200 }"

// Fog stuff. "$fogenable" 1 "$fogcolor" "{ 54 76 91 }" "$fogstart" -10 "$fogend" 15 $lightmapwaterfog 1

"GPU<2" { "$fallbackmaterial" "hr_massive/island_water_01_cheap" } }

Reflections are broken when you don't make a 3d skybox (hollowed cube covered by toolskybox material with sky_camera entity inside). For maps without 3d skybox you must use "$reflect2dskybox" and env_sun will not be reflected.