CS:GO Blog - Lighting and Shader Improvements

    With the release of Operation: Wildfire last week, Valve introduced some new features to Hammer, material parameters, and shaders. All seem to be really nice additions and greatly increase the potential realism of future levels for CS:GO and beyond.

    This also may explain the recent difficulties some mappers have experienced with VRAD, as there were several major adjustments made to the process.

    See for yourself and report back here with your thoughts!

    Suprised Source is still alive and kicking, and looking pretty while doing it.

    + Those hammer improvements make me a little envious of you CSGO guys :sad:

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    They also added a skybox_swapper entity, allows you to fake weather effects really nicely!

    PS Mapcore doesn't support inline web/gifv embedding? http://imgur.com/v9Nm2nv

    I like how they didn't even mention they fixed the shaded textures view in Hammer. That was my favorite thing haha.

    I wonder how much we'll see phong materials for brushes from now on. I gotta do some testing in regards to looks and performance but if the latter isn't an issue - why not use it pretty much everywhere? Any reason against it apart from possible performance issues?

    Quote from NihiL

    I like how they didn't even mention they fixed the shaded textures view in Hammer. That was my favorite thing haha.

    I wonder how much we'll see phong materials for brushes from now on. I gotta do some testing in regards to looks and performance but if the latter isn't an issue - why not use it pretty much everywhere? Any reason against it apart from possible performance issues?

    I remember reading a thread with some good information and experiments with phong shading on world materials. Search MapCore for it. I imagine it will be used quite a lot as the effect looks believable.

    It's nice but i'm still troubled at the lack of envmap mipmapping. It would be nice if the roughness factor influenced cubemaps (considering how lights are rendered inside cubemap as well).

    Quote from Vaya

    imagine a map where the spawns are in weather like that!

    I had the exact same idea for some reasons

    1. Cubemaps are still not parallax corrected.
    2. 2K cubemaps (unclick SmartEdit in env_cubemap entity and set cubemapsize to 10) must be rendered in 4K desktop resolution (Source must have 2048 pixels vertical and horizontal).
    3. Very good models and shadows changes. Now we can create a map with a lot of them for better quality - details, like windows, looks better, we can use them for tesselled bricks etc. without bad lighting.
    4. Valve has a Source 2 engine, with PBR etc. and I can see that Valve employees made a new de_nuke looks like on it - faked PBR, a lot of models... So... I think that we would see a new version of CS:GO, when all parents buy a new PC's for their children, who still spend a lot of money for skins and stickers. Valve can't release Source 2 patch, because it will not work on children PC's. Look at new de_nuke criticism posts on Valve sites. "Players" writing a lot of bad things about it, especially less FPS count... I have a good PC and framerate too.

    Quote

    I remember reading a thread with some good information and experiments with phong shading on world materials. Search MapCore for it. I imagine it will be used quite a lot as the effect looks believable.

    Then we had a commands for anisotropic reflections, didn't work properly at that time.

    Quote from NihiL

    I wonder how much we'll see phong materials for brushes from now on. I gotta do some testing in regards to looks and performance but if the latter isn't an issue - why not use it pretty much everywhere? Any reason against it apart from possible performance issues?

    I noticed they didn't use a single phong material on new Nuke, not even on models. They did use a lot of them on new Train which was released more than a year ago. On Nuke they used pre-made cubemaps for reflections on every brush and model material. Does anyone find this weird? Maybe that's how they prepare the map for Source 2 port?

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