I remember playing one of the early CS betas as a Half-life mod in ~1999.
It was such a huge leap in gameplay and style from anything else out there.
Most FPSs up to this point were SciFi based, guns like the BFG and plasma guns. Counterstrike's focus on realism really altered how you connected with the game. Columbine had happened very recently and was still very much in the zeitgeist. There was a very real cultural attack on video games as a scapegoat for the massacre.
My friends and I would build CounterStrike maps that were the layout of our highschool and would then run around and shoot each other. This was very taboo at the time. We knew that this would be interpreted as threatening by the powers-that-be at highschool, but it was exciting.
> My friends and I would build CounterStrike maps that were the layout of our highschool and would then run around and shoot each other.
There was a small netcafe nearby when I was young that had a good quality T1 connection and hosted their own CS servers. Some of the players got together and actually mapped out the entire netcafe store itself and some of the surrounding area to create a "de_" style map.
This meant you could be playing CS and spawn in the same room that you were actually sitting in.
I can still remember vividly as a 14 year old playing the game and completely dominating a room full of 20-something older guys in the other room. They didn't know who I was and every time I would stomp them they would yell "FUCK" from the other room. Eventually after a series of absurd kills they angrily stormed over to our room in a hostile manner ready to fight and 100% convinced I was somehow cheating. The look on their face when they realized they were "prepared" to fight a kid and the realization as I openly allowed them to inspect the PC for whatever they thought was modified on it was hilarious.
I remember thinking the T1 that lit up my entire school district was insanely fast. That was until I went to college and found they had a 2Gbit fiber optic Internet2 link on campus. That was mind blowing.
My memory was marathon on the Mac played over a similar connection speed. I forget the software but it allowed a networked game to be emulated over a PPP dialup session.
Doom was ok over dial up computer to computer. Quake was even slow connected direct over modem. I would guess the slowness was the extra data for the 3rd dimension going over the wire.
I have never, ever seen pings as low as the ones I've seen 15/20 years ago when playing online.
I remember when I played Counter Strike 1.5 or 1.6 on a 10 MBit fiber which was very new at the time and pinging on servers nor far my house (few miles) even sub 10 ms. Those were numbers that competed with lan servers over ethernet.
Nowadays I have a much better connection, and yet, I rarely see myself with such a small latency anymore, it's at least twice that.
I agree about the big comercial servers/games. The community driven servers are often better latency, e.g. I got 7ms in this game, the same server was 60ms when gaming through the VPN and enterprise proxy.
Nice! I've always appreciated how moddable games like this have traditionally been. I texture-mapped? skinned? myself and my friends onto the models in the Counterstrike installations we had on the four computers we kept LAN'd together in our apartment.
Well. We only ended up playing with them a couple of times, because it ended up feeling uncomfortably gruesome - shooting and and killing your friends in cs_italy or whatever.
Mapping out familiar buildings and locations? A much less traumatizing use of time and resources. Kudos.
Those prefixes indicate the map mission type, not a style. "de" indicates a demolition or defusal mission. The actual official map name is what's after the underscore. I think there were only those and the "cs" "counterstrike" hostage maps at the start.
That is correct. The pedantic and accurate term would be "objective" since they are basically modify the win conditions of the round, but I chose to use the word "style" because it comes down to how you want to play the game.
There are many players that play "cs_" maps where you're technically supposed to be grabbing hostages and returning them to the spawn zone, but many players chose to play those maps in a different style where they just eliminate all the other players or run out the timer.
Likewise on "de_" maps you're supposed to plant the bomb, but instead many players choose to simply use the bomb to pressure (by essentially tricking the enemy into thinking you care about the bomb) people into situations and trade out kills.
Nope. I just remember the early versions. I didn't get hooked--stopped well before it was moved to Steam, which I thought was bloatware (and it was back then). My younger brother was obsessed with it for a while, though.
> My friends and I would build CounterStrike maps that were the layout of our highschool and would then run around and shoot each other. This was very taboo at the time.
I had a friend that was the victim of a local news "expose" on this. Just a harmless high school geek who thought it would be fun to combine the School blueprints with his CAD course to build a "fun" way of digitizing the blueprints.
The main lesson we learned from this exercise is that the Duke Nukem 3D pistol is totally OP when used in realistically proportioned hallways. Auto-aim and all.
The other lesson we learned is that local news investigative reporters care more about a compelling story than to represent the mundane truth.
I did this and showed my school’s head of ICT (in the UK, where there’s near zero threat of shootings happening) and they were just happy I was doing something to keep myself out of other sorts of trouble, if anything.
Yeah, my buddy and I mapped out a lot of the school in 3dsmax for our 3d/computer class. We never did anything with it because, well, yeah. We REALLY wanted to make it into a Counter-Strike map but I mean, you can guess how that would have gone. It sure solidified our grade in the class though, we took photos of the vending machines, lockers etc. and texture-mapped them onto the geometry we built out. Seriously fun project.
I remember creating a map of my high school in the Build engine for duke3d.exe matches. This was before Columbine, but every outsider, nerd kid had fantasized in a similar way.
We got our aggressions out on deathmatch, but it never occurred to us in a million years to actually hurt people IRL. We hated the jocks and the preps with the burning passion of a billion Wolf-Rayet stars, but never thought to hurt any of them, we simply accepted our lot in the genetic and social lottery and hoped to get revenge later in life (so far so good, judging by facebook).
We knew that this would be interpreted as threatening by the powers-that-be at highschool
These days that kind of behavior, if reported to law enforcement (mandatory reporting in some cases), will get investigated with the potential for criminal charges, and likely school expulsion.
I wonder if that's legal, given that mapmaking is protected expression, and a recent ruling saying that (public) schools can't police protected expression off of school grounds.
Without a clear expression of threat, I don't think simple mapmaking is sufficient grounds for a terror threat charge.
It's not simple mapmaking though is it? It's creating a map inside a video game to simulate school grounds.
Drawing a map of the school and putting it in a frame on your wall? Fine.
Drawing a map, recreating it inside a first person shooter, then spending hours playing (training) memorizing the map? I believe anyone could see that as a terroristic threat.
Edit: Example Legos. Having a Lego model of the US Capital? Fine
Have a Lego Capital, attend the Jan 6 protest, have books and other militia type information? Probably going to get questioned by the feds.
I think you might also need to consider the context though - well before the thought of a “school shooting” was an annual occurrence. If schools had metal detectors it was for knives or worst case, a hand gun. And guns themselves are not universally liked or practiced with. I seriously doubt someone would suggest that playing an fy_ map is grounds for practicing anything except video games. Extending a video game to reproducing a school ground or neighbourhood seems natural - when I wanted to make my first text based game, I tried making it about different rooms of my house, for example. People often want to model the world around them just to see if they can.
What about the context of flying a commercial airliner into a skyscraper?
Moussaoui enrolled in a flight simulator training course at a Pan Am facility near Minneapolis, Minnesota. Pan Am’s Minneapolis facility used flight simulators only, and the training there usually consisted of initial training for newly hired airline pilots or refresher training for active pilots.
Again, context. That’s actually a training course. And a plane is mostly computerized. So it makes sense to not train for emergency situations up in the air in a real plane. If Counter-Strike were used for actual training, and maybe it was somewhere, then I’d agree this breaks the rule. But I would never say that making a map means wanting to plan something in real life. It just doesn’t mean that, even if it looks that way. A game like CS is generally not actually a training simulator, it’s just a way to waste time with friends, etc. You don’t actually get any real world feedback or exercise or anything. I would argue actually playing paintball at school would be riskier, though… it also sounds like fun. Maybe it’s a question of harm or intent?
It's a Cessna rather than a commercial airliner, but slamming a plane into landmark buildings was not tabo or out of the ordinary pre-9/11: https://youtu.be/ssig3LUCwng?t=4m35s.
> Drawing a map, recreating it inside a first person shooter, then spending hours playing (training) memorizing the map? I believe anyone could see that as a terroristic threat.
I'd like to point out that "legal" means "not forbidden by law", which in our default-allow mode means "no law exists that prohibits it". This affects both criminal charges for playing CS in a school-like map as well as the behaviour of the school in response to that.
The correct way to assess legality is therefore not "anyone could see" but "is there a law that prohibits it?"
(Note that the hurdle to expulsion may be lower than for criminal charges.)
Kids got in serious trouble for this back then too. I'm not sure I could find a article, but I do remember hearing about it happening in the news (post columbine). I'm pretty sure the kids who committed columbine also did this with a Doom level editor. So rightly or not, school officials would see this as copy-cat behavior.
There's got to be a name for this phenomenon where people focus in on a pattern that may be consistent between events but is actually an incredibly common set of factors that it's totally nom-predictive.
It is an error in Bayesian reasoning. All high school shooters play violent video games, but not all kids who play violent video games are going to shoot up their high schools.
It's usually presented as a group of "red flags" that sound rare in summation. Everyone knows kids play violent video games. What I see among school shooters is things like, has threatened classmate in the past, is on anti-depresents/in therapy and played violent video games.
Some of those things may indeed be a factor in the actual event so it might actually have _some_ merit to bring up but I also probably just described ~5% of kids so it's not at all useful for predictability but it's presented as a "we should have seen it coming" or "why didn't anybody do anything!?".
The violent video games thing is nothing more than a panic but mental health issues and a history of actual violence are the actual ingredients of a mass shooter, it's just not predictive.
The drugs more than the "mental illnesses" contributed to the shootings, it is theorized.
Charles Whitman conducted a mass shooting in 1966, and the supplies he hauled along with his guns and ammo were Dexedrine and Excedrin.
Once upon a time, antidepressants carried a black box warning that they may cause homicidal ideations. That's right, not merely suicidal, but homicidal. And many psychoactive drugs actually work to cause the symptoms they purport to alleviate.
It is alleged, perhaps by conspiracy theorists, that pharmaceutical and psychiatric evidence in the Columbine trials was actively suppressed. Who knows?
But it's an interesting synergy that every mass shooting is followed by political calls for "more mental health care" which translates to more budget to put more people on drugs, so if the drugs are causing the shootings, then you have the perfect storm, don'tcha?
I could easily see it being predictive. Not the violent game part, but the map editing. Conducting surveillance, and acquiring maps are well known important steps in evil-doing. It helps with playing around with various scenarios, figuring out your pathing, first open fire there, then fire a bit there, then exit through there. Police likely to come from there, taking them x minutes. They could be stalled by doing y. Etc.
> My friends and I would build CounterStrike maps that were the layout of our highschool and would then run around and shoot each other. This was very taboo at the time. We knew that this would be interpreted as threatening by the powers-that-be at highschool, but it was exciting.
I think every budding DOOM and Duke Nukem 3D map creator made their school at one point. Of course, that was years before Columbine (despite the inclusion of DOOM in the Columbine finger-pointing), and nobody thought twice about it then.
I wanted to make a map of my high school for CSS but I thought it would be too taboo in the post columbine world, so instead I made a version of my parents house with some added ladders. Honestly it was great fun playing with my friends who had been over and knew the real life layout. Hiding in the closet or peeking out the back window into the yard for flankers was great!
I miss map making. The hammer editor wasn't the best but it was simple enough to figure out, and I actually had some old blueprints of the house layout that made it easier to get things to scale. I don't think many newer games like Call of Duty have the same community spirit of community servers, community maps, etc.
Counter-argument, before CS (CounterStrike) the predecessor we played a ton of was multiplayer Goldeneye 64. The guns weren’t super realistic, but it also wasn’t a giant leap to CS.
The big thing with CS was the online multiplayer with low lag, and it was popular enough that you didn’t have to wait long to join a room - which was a whole lot different than having friends over and playing couch multiplayer.
Doom users did what you say on creating real life based environments before, to be honest. And, yes, FPS where scifi based but the Delta Force series had more realism than CS itself.
Sure there were some real gun mods in doom, but the gun sprite resolution was crap, the limitations of the engine added limitations to map design and while multi-player was possible it wasn't anything like the post-quakeworld era.
We also built a similar map while in high school in the late 2000s, no one really complained (keep in mind I'm not from the US). Some of our teachers quite liked it though. We just viewed it as a familiar location (albeit with secret tunnels, lifts and higher ceilings), it had no particular negative connotations.
I was in high school in 2001 when Counter Strike exploded in popularity in Spain. We also discussed to make a map of our high school, one teacher even got us the floorplans! Mind you, this was one year after a guy killed all his family with a katana and the media blamed it on games. Still, nobody thought we were criminals. The benefits of living in a mostly peaceful country I guess...
My journey started with Action Quake II mod, which was an action-movie inspired mod (complete with Lights, Camera, Action when a round starts). I wasn't too thrilled with sci-fi style FPS games, they held little appeal to me, but I easily logged a thousand hours on Action Quake. Then moved onto CS and BF2 from there. There went my high-school years!
Sorry to make this an "old-off" but I played Action Quake, a Quake II mod that was how you described your CS experience. An interesting feature on Action Quake that never made it to its modern counterparts was being able to jump into an enemy to perform a kick attack. It's also my first experience with friendly fire. I had a blast playing online with Action Quake. That was probably the time I realized mouse + keyboard was far superior to keyboard-only.
That’s around the time I started playing too. I still go through phases where I’ll get really into a new game. I don’t have the reaction time of the younger generation but the skills built up over decades of gaming allows me to stay competitive.
BF recreated his house and the square in front of it in hl2. He added secret room to his house. We only ever played it 1vs1 but it's one of my top 5 FPS memories ! The fun came from walking in a setting I knew and recognizing it as "our" immediate surroundings. It was not about killing each other, though blowing up part of the furniture in the house was fun.
I didn't like playing with people who were too much focused on killing+owning/taunting other players though, it was (and still is) my limit.
I remember being so enjoyed by the inability to walk into buildings and shoot from there that I tried to build a whole map full of office buildings. Don’t think I ever got further than a single building and a parking garage though.
was asked and very tempted to create a map of my school back in the day, but awareness of the ramifications stopped that from happening. additionally, the powers-that-be were very incompetent, especially in regards to judging these kinds of situations
I worked at a high-pressure game company and I remember an engineer showing me a Counterstrike map they made of our company's office building, desks and all. It was amusing at the time, but in retrospect, maybe I should have said something to HR.
Man, what a trip down memory lane. Learned to fear that AWP sound again immediately.
Counter to others I'm actually surprised by how little I enjoyed it. I used to play a ton of FPSes back in the day (CS betas to 1.6 heyday) then stopped for well over a decade. Picked up Call of Duty during the pandemic as a means to stay social with friends and told myself barely anything had changed. Boy was this a great lesson that things have, in fact, changed a lot.
IMO, the latest COD is really bad with regard to how the game feels to play. There is still some sort of shitty e-sports objective that is being optimized for and no one in charge seems to care.
If you go back to something as recent as COD Vanguard, you will find the gunplay is likely closer to what you recall. I play in lobbies like Ship Haus 24/7 to get myself warmed up. It is really hard to feel competent dropping straight into a gigantic campaign-style map with skilled players scattered throughout.
I only played WZ1, so didn't experience the in-between iterations, but the current WZ 2 experience is such a miss. It baffles me how that was playtested and no one said "this is a massive regression in both fun and functionality". I understand wanting to mix it up, but to introduce tedium (looting system as designed), boredom (map size + mobility), and frustration (ping system / loadout changes / general bugginess) seems so misguided. Instead of leaning into what made WZ1 a massive initial success (an arcade-style, generally high-action BR) and try to emulate what other BRs are doing better.... it makes no sense to me.
I think this is at the heart of what is driving me nuts with COD lately. I never touched war zone except to prove to myself that I hate it. You can still play COD the old fashioned way (but even this sucks now).
Either make an arena shooter or make a BR. Trying to make a game that fits both genres at the same time is what is probably ruining everything. Gameplay that feels good and balanced on a 100m^2 map is not going to feel the same on a 100km^2 map.
I recently started playing Urban Terror after seeing it posted here. The gunplay, weapon design, and map design all remind me a lot of CS as well (I never played Quake 3 so I have no reference point there).
That’s exactly where CS actually came from. The Q2 mod, Action Quake2, where every round starts with “Lights, Camera, Action”.
The developer of action quake 2, Gooseman, went on to create CS as a mod for half-life.
Urban terror is the Q3 port of action quake 2.
AQ2 still has a small community of players. I get on occasionally for the nostalgia hit. I’ve never found an FPS that’s as fast paced and difficult to master (movement primarily).
Interesting bit of history. Didn't play Action Quake 2, but had great fun playing The Specialists, which I believe was also inspired by Action Quake 2.
There's also the iw4x project that brings community servers and patches to the 2009 Modern Warfare 2. The game mechanics, asinine matchmaking algorithm, map design, and monetization model of 2019+ Call of Dutys don't spark joy for those who grew up on 90's/00's PC multiplayer games.
So true. It was like that quote from Bane in The Dark Knight Rises:
"Oh, you think social distancing is your ally. But you merely adopted social distancing; I was born in it, moulded by it. I didn't socialise until I was already a man, by then it was nothing to me but BLINDING!"
AssaultCube offers the best balance IMO. It's 90s-style with the custom maps and all, but it's semi-realistic and not too fast or crazy. Game play is simple yet has a high skill cap. Graphics are pretty good. Public servers are all casual and unranked (there are also private ladder ones), but people still try their best. And it's free and low-resource.
I tried this web CS1.6 and was immediately greeted with "your skill level is too low for this server" :/
I was the original mapper for the Day of Defeat team. It was quite a ride to go from a bunch of strangers making a mod for fun to working with Valve.
I haven't played it in ages, but do sometimes think about going back into map making just for fun and maybe more as artistic expression. Always that temptation to make something neat looking, but not very performant.
Have there been any rumblings about a new version? DoD was my main game for quite a while. I got into it before CS existed and stuck with it after CS got bug. Eventually I made the switch to CS and really got into CSGO for competitive play, but I'd love to play a new DoD.
I really enjoyed playing Day of Defeat back in the day, but now days there is a great WW2 hardcore FPS out there called "Hell Let Loose" that is very immersive both extremely frustrating and rewarding at the same time. RTS like meta game, with FPS infantry squad mechanics, huge emphasis on communication and team play, decent graphics, lots of attention to little details.
It's not without its warts and faults, but after not having played any serious WW2 shooters since Day of Defeat, I now have around 400 hours into this game, and am still having a ton of fun.
DoD and DoDS might be my favorite multiplayer FPS ever. I picked up DoDS in my last year of university (2007/08), and I don't even know how I could finish my degree. The community was absolutely amazing.
I loved CS1.x (and CS:Source, which many didn't enjoy). I did NOT enjoy CS:GO.
I loved Overwatch for the first few years.
Valorant initially disappointed me because I wanted a better Overwatch, but Valorant was a better Counter-Strike mixed with Overwatch. CS:GOverwatch, if you will.
I rapidly fell in love with it and had lots of fun. Unfortunately an IRL injury to my wrist stopped me enjoying it for a while, until I started playing with a vertical gaming mouse. I still have less mechanical skill than I started with, but it was really fun.
Valorant is Free-to-Play (with no pay-to-win crap or loot boxes). Very much worth giving a try.
Played this for a bit but ran into some trouble with the key mappings. CTRL to crouch means that I can't really press anything else without causing firefox to ruin the game.
* CTRL+R (reload) causes the page to refresh
* CTRL+W (walk forward) attempts to close the current tab
* CTRL+S (walk backward) opens a dialog to save the current page
* CTRL+D (walk right) bookmarks the current page
Luckily firefox shows a confirmation dialog before refresh or closing the tab, but that causes the game to freeze until you dismiss it.
Say what you like about Apple, but having all these functions on the Cmd key instead is not just more logical, it's actually sane (doubly so for the terminal). I think MS has missed an enormous opportunity when they introduced the Win key; and X11 desktops, toolkits, and apps imitated the more familiar (rather than the better) solutions.
It is a coincidence. The issue is commands in the game clashing with the browser, an environment it was never meant to run in. Whatever command-key you want to use for shortcuts, both applications have equal claim to wanting to use them - is is about application shortcust vs. application shortcust not OS shortcuts vs. application shortcuts. It only works out because the game was developed for a different platform than the browser, which by coincidence uses a different key for commands.
It is a sort of coincidence that Apple decided the pinky finger button should be control rather than command. The other way around and crouch-jumping would be more difficult and you'd want to rebind it... but you would then run into the same keybind overlap issue as experienced on Windows/Linux.
What’s insane about a standardized key mapping that is predictable across apps and works? On windows you can never be sure what any key combo will do from app to app.
I mean it's an intentional design decision to avoid using ctrl for OS shortcuts. Coincidence is a bit much! (Not an Apple partisan, stopped using Macs when I couldn't open iTunes without being pitched Apple Music)
The control key was designed with the intent of subtracting 0x60 (or 0x40 if you assume the base state is caps) from a character code to send a control code. It's not some coincidence that "ctrl-c" sends an interrupt on the console, if you take a look at any ascii table[1] you can see it was designed that way.
Repurposing that key to instead perform unrelated arbitrary commands is the insane move, and it only seems normal because you grew up using Windows and never thought to question it.
Apple's mappings make much more sense, especially with both OSs having a Meta key.
Can't speak for Windows, but GNOME and KDE heavily use the window key by default for DE and window management functions. Applications are pretty free to use control and alt keys to their heart's desire (they're free to use the window key too, but if the DE/WM captures a particular hot key, it won't work... it's not often that applications try to actually use it).
One thousand times this. Even though there are exceptions, it makes for a far better experience. Even as I am writing this: control+A is Emacs-like keybindings, goes to the beginning of the line. Under Windows and even Linux, depending on the app it's probably going to run "select all", and we have to resort to home and end (but then these also have a chance of scrolling stuff).
It's good to know that "command" will run commands. Easier to explain to new users too.
The Windows key is indeed a missed opportunity. The main reason the opportunity was missed is likely to be because Microsoft did not control the hardware. Even after Windows 95 was introduced, many keyboards continued to lack the Windows key for quite a while. How do you deal with that? Not allowing apps to run? Having a fallback for when there isn't a windows key? Now the interface is inconsistent.
We're going to have to agree to disagree on that one. I love that macOS uses the command key for traditional CUA bindings, leaving control sequences open for me to continue using my Emacs style keybindings in all cocoa text widgets.
it's basically the same list, on a different key, which doesn't really change anything.
on Emacs it's only a matter of remapping those keys, if someone wanted to one could easily do it on every system. I've been forced to use Windows lately and thanks to Microsoft Powertoys I've remapped all the relevant keybindings to the ones I'm used to.
It took 2 minutes total.
I could have used the windows key, but why? what's the advantage? so that I could play CS online in a browser?
BTW on CS, if I remember correctly, to duck you simply press the left CTL, but in this version the key is C it is also very clearly specified in the help to use CTL only in full screen mode
so the entire thread is based on false information.
Personally thumb + C and thumb + V on apple keyboards always felt a lot easier than pinky finger + C and pinky finger + V which just felt and still feels weird.
Cmd+Shift+T is fine to hold to re-open a tab, but Ctrl+Shift+T makes my hands hurt on a regular keyboard. It's also annoying to have to switch between Ctrl+C to copy in normal apps, but in a terminal that would cancel the command, so you have to do Ctrl+Shift+C there. On a mac keyboard it's always the same. I've tried to use e.g. autohotkey to get the same consistency but it's rather annoying (need to inspect which window is active, sometimes doesn't work).
> on Macs the CMD key is simply a poor man's CTRL key, except when you are in a terminal, where you have to use CTRL again...
Let me check.
Cmd-F in Notes.app, finds things in the current note.
Cmd-F in Terminal.app, finds things in the current terminal session's history.
Cmd-C in Calendar.app, copies an event.
Cmd-C in Terminal.app, copies the selected text.
Cmd-T in Finder.app, opens a tab.
Cmd-T in Terminal.app, opens a tab.
Cmd-W closes the current window/tab. Cmd-Q quits the app. Cmd-S saves. And so on, in any app, tracing back to 1984 or so.
Whereas Ctrl-C, Ctrl-T, Ctrl-F, Ctrl-S, on Windows/Linux... all do wildly different things, depending whether you are in an xterm, cmd.exe, a game, Emacs, or some other app.
You know what else? Ctrl-C in Terminal.app does the same thing as Ctrl-C in an xterm. This sort of thing is consistent in every app. You're literally having your cake and eating it too.
Windows couldn't use Ctrl-W to mean "close the current tab" in every single application, because - indeed, in a game, holding down Ctrl could mean crouch/sneak, and W to move forward. Windows could've chosen to use Win-W for that, but ignored the opportunity.
> anyway, this is just a coincidence
One of these patterns visible here is deliberate design, the other is piled up coincidences. I don't think it's that easy to confuse one for the other?
> Cmd-F in Terminal.app, finds things in the current terminal session's history.
> Cmd-C in Terminal.app, copies the selected text.
you gotta love Mac users and their cultural bubble
these are non standard keybindings for a Unix shell
so if you are in every other Unix, you have to relearn them
Apple is basically crippling you and locking you in, teaching you the wrong way to do stuff.
It's like learning Italian from Mario Bros and a few stereotypes about gestures taken from American stand ups.
But people seem so happy of their ignorance nowadays that I am probably on the wrong side here.
> in a game, holding down Ctrl could mean crouch/sneak
what happens in a game stays in a game, it doesn't really matter the game has exclusive control of the inputs, they could remap every button to do everything who really cares?
When I'm in VSCode the left mouse click doesn't shoot at anything...
> you gotta love Mac users and their cultural bubble
I've been using Windows for ~10, Linux for ~20, and Mac for 4 years. I've also worked on my own toy terminal emulator and shell. I believe that good design should be recognised for what it is, regardless of branding, and learned from to improve different aspects of the tools we build and use.
I would very much appreciate it if we could continue this conversation without assuming bias or ignorance.
> these are non standard keybindings for a Unix shell
The shell can't interpret Cmd, which is exactly my point. The terminal emulator is able to provide functionality that the shell alone can't (unless the shell takes on some part of the terminal's duties, a la tmux).
> Apple is [...] teaching you the wrong way to do stuff.
What is the correct way to copy text from a terminal then?
I just want to copy text back & forth between a terminal and a browser. I don't want to memorise two different sets of keybindings to perform the same action. I don't care if copy is Ctrl-Shift-C, or Win-CapsLock-2, I just want the key bindings to remain consistent, to reduce mental fatigue.
> When I'm in VSCode the left mouse click doesn't shoot at anything...
If I'd open Counter Strike in VS Code (100% possible, see TFA), then I would 100% expect left click to shoot.
On the other hand, I've had to rebind some of my StarCraft II hotkeys to make them work on Windows, because normally I use Alt+[F1-F4] for setting up camera hotkeys and... Alt-F4 does something special on Windows, that the game can't ignore.
> I believe that good design should be recognised for what it is, regardless of branding
I am not at all influenced by the brand.
Windows key was a mistake too IMO (that are two BTW! one emulates the right mouse click).
ALT+space was a perfectly fine combo to press with one thumb (especially on laptop keyboards) to open a menu or the app launcher.
They add nothing to the table, it's just another modifier, they are both seriously inferior to function keys, that Mac tried so hard to remove and failed, because a touchbar sucks compared to a physical key.
Just simple plain HMI since Engelbart proved what computers could do.
> I would very much appreciate it if we could continue this conversation without assuming bias or ignorance.
Being a user and being knowledgeable of what constitute a good input interface are two different things.
If you ask people right now they will say touch screens are great, but they are wrong, physical keys are better, we have senses, if we don't use them, we are artificially making us disabled.
Which is never great.
Devices should enhance our capabilities, not cripple them.
Having to remember hundreds of arcane key combos, spread over 10 modifiers it's the exact opposite of good design.
That's why we invented CUA.
> What is the correct way to copy text from a terminal then?
if mouse is enabled
select with LEFT mouse clicked, paste with MIDDLE mouse click
otherwise
ALT+insert SHIFT+insert
that's legacy though, I agree if you are thinking it, but it's out of necessity, not out of will, that it is better to know what works everywhere.
knowing basic vi will enable you to edit text files everywhere on Unix, Emacs not really, Joe? let's hope it's Linux.
> I just want the key bindings to remain consistent, to reduce mental fatigue.
that's exactly why having CMD, CTRL, OPTION (that everybody else call ALT!) is a bad idea.
Apple is so innovative that they can't let go their original keyboard from 40 years ago.
At least back then the Apple key was the Apple logo, it had a branding purpose.
> If I'd open Counter Strike in VS Code (100% possible, see TFA), then I would 100% expect left click to shoot.
of course. because in that case you would be running CS inside VSCode.
but VSCode could disable overriding what the left click does if they wanted to.
Yep, but the Lisa isn't a Mac, which is the system under discussion. The Mac has the same keyboard it has always had, though the adding of the 'command' notation directly on the key is more recent.
Interestingly the Apple III was the first Apple computer with a command/Apple key, which then subsequently appeared on the IIe/IIc/IIIgs so that is the true origin.
NeXT also adopted the command key, which I'm sure was handy when it's OS was adapted into OS X.
The default keyboard layout is a big reason why I keep using macs tbh. I’ve used windows all my life and used a bunch of linux distros but the only os where my fingers are comfortable is on a mac. Swedish ISO btw.
Sure, it’s definitely possible. But getting a consistent layout, copy paste behavior and locale setup I like across editor, terminal, tmux, file explorer and browser in a Swedish ISO layout is a surprisingly big chore. I know a few Swedish programmers who use ANSI US keyboards and have special bindings for our Å,Ä,Ö characters.
I haven't looked in a while but I could never find an easy way to mimic macOS's cmd/ctrl behavior in Linux. Being able to cmd+c to copy from a terminal window comes in clutch.
Not saying it's what's keeping me from using Linux for everything or anything, but that's a more annoying shortcut and also requires me to not accidently do the same key combo that gets used in every other application. It's nice that I can muscle-memory cmd+c on my Mac and not have to think about it when I'm using the terminal specifically
Eh, I might complain about the hardware sometimes but it's not like I can get a Linux laptop that's anywhere near as good in terms of build quality... Well. Unless I just install Linux on my MacBook of course...
Are you talking about the game or in general? MacBook trackpads have pretty intuitive gestures, just pinch zoom or two-finger scroll with cmd. If you're talking about the game, I don't know of any trackpad that isn't clunky as hell to play an FPS with
Unfortunately for most of us Counter-Strike players the idea of remapping any keys is a non-reality at this point. We've been playing the game for 20 something years and our brain has accepted keys as they are.
I guess that's what happens when you play using the same configuration for 3000 hours of playtime. Fortunately, you don't have to remap keys since it's already mapped to ctrl and c, but you would have to remap your brain.
It is too bad esdf lost to wasd as the convention for FPS controls. Then we could have the unimportant qwazx keys on the left, instead of all these special keys like control and alt.
For anyone interested in WebAssembly and the future of gaming in the browser - my team and I at Wonder Interactive are bringing the full power of native gaming to the web. We're building out a platform and suite of tools that allows developers to publish, host, share, and monetize their games directly to their players online, without 30% fees.
The current focus is on the Unreal Engine (4.24, 4.27) and UE5 support which is coming later this year. Other engines will follow such as Unity, Godot, Open 3D Engine, and custom engines we can provide porting for on our paid plans. We're building out a WebGPU backend for UE5, to really enable high end desktop and console quality games in HTML5.
Given the boundary condition that a web browser can certainly not allow a game to make more out of the hardware, that is, the best case is that in-browser gaming is equal to native gaming, and the probable case is that it's somewhat worse; what is the rationale between targeting a browser?
Yes, an example is the .io games, which kids love to play, because they just go to the browser and load the page and they are playing with other kids, just like that. No installation, no setup, no network debugging, etc. These are simple games, but more advanced games would also benefit from nearly frictionless entry to the game.
How would you even "run the numbers"? How about try the idea and see if it works? All it would take is one hit game for devs to see the potential of web gaming (and they already see it. Why do you think flash games were so popular?) If Fortnite could run in the browser it probably would have instantly become the biggest game in the world.
Nice. How will you fix big download times? I imagine it sounds to cool to be able to start a game in a browser straight away until you realise you still have to download it like any native game, so in reality other than avoiding installing a marketplace like Steam it's not much of a difference experience to play in the browser.
The two main ways we address this are with our asset streaming system (only loading in what is needed, everything else loading in the background at runtime) and compression (both data compression and texture compression).
Sound promising, but I tried the sequencer and the town game on Firefox android, both of them loaded but almost every texture was black. And in both examples, the requirements were all "undefined", this doesn't look good at all.
I was always amused by how many of my friends got crazy monitors but still just used headphones. Surround sound for 1.6 made the game incredibly unfair. Being able to hear specifically in what direction and volume footsteps were coming from was basically a wallhack. I would often use headphones because parents weren't the biggest fans of hours of that a night, and it was so crippling.
Funny enough, my semi-pro career (I made $60 total) ended when I abandoned my surround sound when moving out in undergrad.
Surround sound was unnecessary. As long as you had stereo headphones you were fine. I had cheap headphones, expensive headphones and even won headphones at LAN events. Directional audio was never an issue on any headset I'd played with.
I tested them all with this video - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IUDTlvagjJA
The only headphone issue I had in my decades of playing CS were with open ear headphones (Sennheiser HD555) that reduced the punchiness of bass and made footsteps more difficult to hear in CSS which was a terrible game with terrible audio.
Weird. My experience has always been that headphones are more effective at producing precise 3D sound than speakers. And intuitively, it seems like they should, because they can feed each ear with exactly the sound that ear should hear.
That said it does require that the game has good 3D sound generation, which isn't trivial, especially differentiating front and back which requires accounting for the shape of the human ear.
Since everybody's headshape and mass is different, it's hard to do binaural audio that works for everyone.
Also, I'm pretty sure the brain uses small movements of the head to know where sounds come from. So you'd have to have head tracking with virtually no latency.
A bunch of speakers in a circle around you don't have any of these issues.
TBH a bunch of speakers seems like it would be much worse.
If you had an infinite matrix of speakers located at every possible point relative to your head, then you could play each sound from the exact speaker representing the correct direction, and get perfect 3D audio. Maybe it would even be sufficient to have a sphere of speakers around you, or even a circle if elevation isn't relevant in most games.
But in practice we don't have any of those. We have 4 or 5 speakers roughly arranged around the player. If one of those 4 or 5 directions happens to be exactly what you need, then great, play the sound from that speaker and you're good. But if not, then what?
The brain decides the direction of sound based primarily on the relative latency between when it is heard in each ear [0]. How do you create a precise time difference when you have 4-5 different speakers each of which can be heard by both ears?
Plus the game doesn't even usually know exactly where the speakers are located relative to the player's head. Exactly how far away are they? Are the front speakers closer than the back?
With headphones, none of this is a problem. The game can precisely control exactly what the person hears, including precisely controlling interaural time difference.
Yes, I understood your argument. However, your brain does not primarily use head movement to judge location. It primarily uses interaural time difference. Head movement may have some effect (your brain is a neural network trained to use all signals available to it), but ITD is the main factor, at least for most people.
Moreover, it's not clear that 4 point sources of audio can accurately reproduce real-world effects for the purpose of head movements, either.
The latency issue would be in the timing of samples between the sound drivers, not from the game to the sound port. The sound data could take 50ms+ to make it through the DAC, but as long as it plays the signal to each driver with enough precision relative to the other (and assuming the response of the driver is sufficient), your brain would get the orientation info. The frames you're seeing are already around 50ms late for most games anyway (unless you're playing the game at hundreds of fps, which is very possible with cs1.6), and mouse latency is between 50-100ms.
Head tracking wouldn't be necessary because you're always looking straight at the screen and the camera is always aligned with your character's head. You're never going to physically turn your head to get a better angle on a sound source, you'll just turn in game.
I’m surprised to hear 50ms for audio processing. I’m a music producer and I can feel it at about 20ms of latency. (Pressing key on keyboard (musical) to hearing sound)
I would have thought video games wouldn’t have more latency than audio production software.
My DDR setup -- a Windows gaming PC connected to a pretty standard stereo receiver -- has 70ms total latency between button press and audio. That's more than enough to make the game unplayable, except that of course StepMania lets me configure it to pretend button presses occurred 70ms in the past.
It wouldn't surprise me in todays market but humans are much more sensitive to audio than visual. That's why in audio production ~10ms is the max tolerable limit IIRC.
You generally need special headphones for that and they really didn't work that well 20 years ago. I don't recall there being any way to tell the Half Life engine or my sound card "output 6 channels to the headphones" and the engine wouldn't do A3D if it was a stereo device.
By having a 5.1 setup surrounding me (about 2 feet away in each direction, it was.. cluttered), the brain produces a surround sound effect the way it does in normal life.
An expert would have to speak further about how headphones can emulate that, but I don't recall it ever really being a thing in the early 2000s.
You are the first person I’ve ever seen talk about how a surround sound speaker system is better for competitive shooters than stereo headphones, but I might be showing my age here since you are talking about the 2000’s :P
No, I played CS1.6 and I wouldn't consider playing without my headphones.
I didn't have a surround sound system because I was a teenager, but I knifed thousands of noobs coming around the corner wall in iceworld because they were too dumb to walk.
I'm guessing it was an identical effect to the surround sound, it was basically radar. You could hear people across nearly the whole iceworld map.
I have a vivid memory of playing Doom 2 on a 486 in the 90's, hiding in a building with a cyberdemon circling around the outside, and being able to tell exactly where he was based on sound alone. Needless to say Doom produced no more than 2 channels of audio.
Interestingly Doom's audio code was licensed from a third party. When they open sourced it, they had to rewrite that part; I think Carmack said he backported Quake's code. I wonder if that third-party code was just really good or something.
You had to tweak a lot of settings with EAX to make it sound decent, but you could also configure it so you could hear extreme distances, giving you quite the advantage. I bought a Sound Blaster Audigy Gamer card because of that. I had a huge config file that set all sorts of network settings, and even bound PgUp/Dn to cycle through various ex_interp values.. lol
For casual level play it’s indeed fine. But the “flatness” of a level doesn’t really mean much. You want to know which specific part of a nearby room someone is in. To the left… in front? Behind? Are they going through the hallway or cellar in cs_italy?
Like any game, you get huge value out of slight advantages when you get to the more high level skill.
I was around CAL-M level in 1.6 and I never had a surround sound setup, but I'm unconvinced that it has any meaningful benefit over headphones, which worked perfectly fine for intuiting where someone was. That's hardly a real benefit in higher level play, anyway because you know where everyone could be, anyway, and your movement is dictated by that knowledge as well.
Did you stop to think for two seconds before posting this? People can tell where a sound is coming from in a 3d space. That’s why you can tell the difference between a sound directly in front of you and directly behind you.
I remember being blindfolded in high school science class and testing this by having someone clap two sticks together around my head. Surprisingly difficult to tell if something is in front or behind you.
Hearing is more involved than taking sensory input from two sources. If it weren't, there wouldn't be mixing and mastering engineers using speakers. Which they mainly do.
Pretty sure they use speakers because they are mastering primarily for speaker setups. Not because it increases the accuracy of location information encoded in the sound.
Nope. Because headphones don't give you sound pressure fluctuations in your body, and because the depth (not width!) perception is all messed up when using headphones.
Yeah, it's a lot better than without the transfer function. It just doesn't react to my head movements, which speakers do (by staying stationary relative to my head)
You meant this as a sarcastic response, but literally all VR headsets are just 2 displays, 1 per eye. The same thing is true about audio & ears. If you've got a speaker that you know is dedicated strictly to a single ear, then all you need is 2 speakers to simulate audio coming from anywhere.
It's called HRTF and it's not at all a new technology. All you actually need is stereo headphones to have 3d positional audio.
Pro players almost definitely all use headphones, because they're typically on stage for tournaments with their teammates right next to them and their opponents somewhere nearby.
But even when they're not on stage, they're often in the same room with their teammates. And even if that isn't the case for some reason and a player is in their own room, winning those tournaments is generally the highest honor, so pro players would likely want to practice as close to tournament conditions anyways.
Directional audio over headphones is surprisingly good nowadays, though. HRTF is pretty cool stuff.
And because surround is mostly useless, if not messing up sound. With stereo all you need is to move your mouse horizontally to locate the exact direction of any sound.
There are other considerations as well - if game sound is coming over loud speakers, you run the risk of it also being picked up by your microphone when you try to communicate with your teammates.
Friend painted dot in the center of his screen with permanent marker for sniper rifles, especially strongest one became 1-off shotgun. We hated him for that
audio spatialization has gotten really fancy in games. We can trick your eat into thinking sounds are coming from any direction with a combination of filters, delays, attenuations, etc. Of course it's not as good as the real thing but it is still very convincing (and certainly good enough to be competitive in CS these days).
sound blaster at some point allowed you to emulate exaggerated "3d sound" polyphony. I distinctly remember a control panel, where you could drag around surround sound speakers and it would attempt to emulate them in headphones.
Ohhhh right that reminded me of another anecdote: sound cancellation wasn't really a working tech back then so my Vent buddies hated hearing my game. I would have a little earbud in connected to Vent on my other computer so I could hear them, but they'd always hear my game, so I ended up developing this half-assed skill of speaking only during quiet times.
Like Discord but with like 10ms latency to your friends in the area and no fancy pancy filters adding group delay when you speak.
Overall a way superior experience to what we have today.
I remember having actual effortless conversations on Ventrilo. Nowadays speaking in Discord or MS Teams or what ever is exhausting since you interrupt each other due to the delay.
Phones have also gotten worse. It would be interesting to see a number of round trip "ping" for different Voip providers and phone systems ...
Vent aka. Ventrilo was a group voice chat application from about 20 years ago. You'd log into a server and have different "chat rooms" to be in, and it was voice-centric (and text to speech and many other features).
Bad monitors are just a gimped setup. Ungimping your setup doesn't mean compensating for a lack of skill. 60Hz LCDs are extremely hard on the eyes because of the large amount of motion blur inherent to displaying something at 60Hz without strobing. They also had very bad pixel response in 1999. They also had medium-high input lag depending on the model and what colors are being displayed on the screen. You also wanted a high end CRT for both better still image sharpness and better refresh rate (lots of them only did 60Hz or 75Hz, and anything that maxed out at 75Hz probably had bad focus, because focus decreases as you raise the refresh rate). Once you start fixing your system (changing mouse polling rate from 125Hz, disabling mouse acceleration), the monitor is just one more thing to fix. All of this is needed just to be able to game competently with the top say, 50% of players (unless your play style just avoids aiming).
I remember in UT99 for years always running into situations where my aim was slightly off in situations where I was dead sure it should have hit. Turns out it just used the mouse acceleration feature in windows: the speed at which you move the mouse influences how far the crosshair (or cursor) moves. Once I disabled that I became about 5x better. The next big jumps were turning off vsync (and making sure it doesn't turn itself back on) and going back to CRT from LCD.
In cycling there's a term called MAMIL, which means 'Middle Aged Man in Lycra'. It represents a grown man, clearly out of shape, with the latest and greatest equipment that probably cost him north of tens of thousands of dollars, singing praises about about the edge his equipment gives him over everyone else - whilst sporting legs worth about 5 dollars.
I play RTS games, which don't need any fancy equipment to play and win, but still don't believe you need a 5K USD monitor to play CS.
My point is those things that cost money don't help win, reader, unless you're talking about those Nike sprinting shoes that were all the rage in the Olympics last year, those things rule.
Yes I'm well aware of the consumer whore, but you don't understand, none of this is about money, it's about proper configuration.
Vsync: Unbearable amount of input lag, feels like you're moving your mouse in molasses. It can be disabled for free by setting an option. (the amount of lag decreases as refresh rate increases. 60Hz vsync was the worst thing ever. 120Hz is somewhat acceptable).
Me and my friends actually enable vsync from time to time to train ourselves to rely on aim less.
125Hz mouse: Visibly jittery. Just set it to 1000Hz, works on most mice even from 1999.
60HZ CRT: Kills your eyes due to flashing. Get 75Hz
75Hz CRT: Might have bad focus. Get one with good focus
60HZ LCD: Kills your eyes due to motion blur. Suggest 120Hz at bare minimum (yup, motion blur decreases as refresh rate increases). Some models lag as bad as vsync, just get a model that doesn't lag. This has nothing to do with cost, it's a common firmware bug that some models have some don't.
120HZ/240Hz LCD: Might be some garbage with so much overshoot that it's just as bad as the slow pixel response it tried to prevent. Get one without that issue
Is this actually true, or BS? If true, can someone explain?
My mental model is that vsync will lock the framerate to the same as the monitor refresh.
So if monitor is 60hz, my games graphical update rate runs at 60fps.
Let's say without vsync, my graphical update rate would generously go up to 120hz.
Worst case we're talking about an additional input latency due to vsync of maybe 1/60s? 16ms?
I don't believe 16ms is significant for non pro level eSports players and even skeptical it's a big factor at that level.
What am I missing here?
I could understand if the get clock speed was tied to the graphical update rate but I presume that's not the case for CS, server side game etc; or even if it was it's still not going to be that material.
I'm just skeptical - what am I missing here?
Is the mouse input code tied to graphical clock rate or something in some surprising bad way?
>Worst case we're talking about an additional input latency due to vsync of maybe 1/60s? 16ms?
its generally closer to 2 frames with V-Sync [1][2]
> I don't believe 16ms is significant for non pro level eSports players and even skeptical it's a big factor at that level.
It actually is fairly significant. LTT did a series of tests with pro players in CS:GO focused on monitor refresh rate, but one test they did was 60hz/60fps vs 60hz/300fps and found that reducing the render latency drastically improved performance despite the display still being locked to 60hz.
They got Freesync having less lag than no synchronization which means their measurements are likely wrong.
> [2]
All the lag can be calculated on paper, why do they need an empirical study? Their definition of triple buffering is one of following: One is FIFO, used by Microsoft, which causes even more lag than just double buffered. The other is some obscure mode I barely even remember that is incorrect because it drops or doubles various frames.
Run a monitor at 60Hz. Run whatever FPS locker you want (whatever the game has built in, RTSS, etc) at 60FPS then run with the frame locker removed but vsync on. The average person will notice the huge difference. It will be impossible to aim on the latter without getting used to it, and even then you'll still miss lots of shots that you know you should have hit.
it's true that all of these things make a pretty noticeable difference when you know what to look for. but you're not going to recognize 60hz or vsync as "unplayable" unless you're very accustomed to playing on a better setup.
> I could understand if the get clock speed was tied to the graphical update rate but I presume that's not the case for CS, server side game etc; or even if it was it's still not going to be that material.
in cs source, the client could not send updates to the server at a faster rate than it was drawing frames. in other words, if you were playing on a 66 tickrate server but only rendering 50 FPS, you were actually losing some simulation fidelity. of course, if you're not the type of person to notice your frame rate dropping to 50 in the first place, you would probably also not notice this consequence. just an interesting technical fact.
60Hz vsync literally feels worse than 50FPS/60Hz uncapped. I believe 32ms of input lag is not in itself blatantly noticeable. But on top of the base lag of every single game made after 1998, it's extremely bad.
if you have 0 input delay, worst case latency is still 32ms, because your input might come in when back frame is ready, but blit hasn't happened yet: render frame A, input comes in, blit frame A, render frame B, blit frame B.
but your input delay is not 0, so your input might come in before frame A above, but frame A doesn't reflect input yet, which makes your worst case input latency 48ms: input comes in, blit ..., render frame A, blit frame A, render frame B, blit frame B.
there are also bad vsync implementations, that by virtue of being enabled, introduce further delay between state and graphics. or if fps drops under refresh rate, things go out of sync, and your vsync becomes a compounding effect.
finally vsync delay existing in addition to whatever other delays. a 30ms delay for whatever reasons, becomes an 80ms delay because vsync on top.
99% of the time a game after 1998 or so says "vsync" it means double buffered vsync, so I'll explain that version.
Let's say the game renders frames instantly.
Without vsync but locked at 60FPS, an input can take up to 16ms to cause an effect on the monitor because the game loop only applies and renders pending inputs once every 16ms at this framerate. Each input will have between 0ms and 16ms of lag.
In double buffered vsync at 60Hz, its the same thing: the game loop applies and renders pending inputs once every 16ms. But now the frame is not shown on the monitor right away. Instead, the loop waits for the monitor to be ready. And because the loop will restart right after that, this wait will always be another 16ms. Each input will have between 16ms and 32ms lag.
Of course if your render takes more than 16ms you will have more issues, but that's not the problem here. Even with a computer that renders instantly, the lag will be too much.
And yes this will be on top of the already existing lag of the game and peripherals.
I don't understand how you get 48ms. If I have a mouse with 4ms of lag, it will just add a constant 4ms to the total making worst case 32ms + 4ms. I did think it was 48ms at some point but now I think I just imagined it.
you're right, I fucked it up with 48ms logic. an input lag will go to a second 16ms cycle instead of the first one, rather than somehow magically creating a third one
100%. At my peak of competitiveness I played CS and QuakeWorld 640x480 on a 170hz CRT with my Intellimouse overclocked to 1000hz. Movements in game felt like an extension of my arms/hands and getting into a flow state was so easy. I have a 144Hz LED now and it's nice, but not the same.
Yeah that "connected feeling" is what people should talk about when talking about input lag.
> LED
It's actually still an LCD. The manufacturers calling them "LED monitors" is a scam, they just changed out the backlight from CCFL to LED, and it has little to no different characteristics, visually. They actually made billions of dollars from that scam (as in, people straight up buy it thinking it solves viewing angle shift) and nobody noticed, it's pretty funny.
Or because the experience is just noticeably improved...
I could play tennis with a 30$ racket from ALDI but it would be a lot less fun.
I bet you use a high resolution monitor for work? You could argue that is blowing money on something for even a slight advantage, since you could do the same work on a 15" 1024x768 monitor too. Oh, but the experience sucks? Yeah exactly - that's why people want to improve their gaming experience even if those people are casual/only playing as a recreational hobby.
you're skeptical but you had to have been there! cheap 90s hardware was jank, and characteristics you take for granted, because they are on standard issue hardware today, were only available on high end expensive machines.
in Eastern Europe we had computer clubs, which were like internet cafes, but without internet. you went there to play lan games, paid by the hour. they were usually packed, and people were usually decent. you had computer club rats, and I was one of them. I played q1, q2 and then cs for money. you show up to a club, strike a pose, "your club's cs fu are that of a dog, I challenge any one of you lamers to de_dust 1x1 deagle only", and then sometimes if you met your match you'd put cash up. even working, well maintained hardware ranged in quality to the point of making significant difference to a game. you always carried your own mouse at least (and sometimes a keyboard), and a config on a floppy disk. but the one thing you learned to spot were monitor makes and brands, for the reasons guy you responding to stated. in fact, occasionally computer club admins in collusion with their house teams will put you on a machine with poor monitor. if you had big team vs team match planned, you'd schedule an outing to a downtown club with known high refresh rate monitors and quality hardware (they were never "the club next door" and their hourly rate was usually higher) to both level the playing field and provide peak possible playing experience.
well, my anecdote was supposed to demonstrate that I have a direct lived experience where hardware made a significant difference, everyone knew it made significant difference, and both that knowledge and the implications of that knowledge were part of the social game, because money and prestige was riding on it.
it is also from the world that's entirely unconnected to the American obsession with "buying the best skiis, recommended by the skiing daily magazine, before ever getting to a slope", which is a real thing, and I agree with you there.
there's definitely a Boris somewhere in the middle of nowhere who can cyka blyat on a 60mhz crt and a pentium 4 in cs:go to this day smh, and there's also a lamer with souped up ryzen who can't aim for shit. but all else being equal competitive advantage from hardware is not always and not exclusively "golden vacuum tube amp connectors".
In computer gaming (RTS / FPS) equipment matter, especially in FPS.
Not to mention your internet connection.
I would guesstimate about 100% more effectiveness compared to a subpar setup. Meaning all else equal the guy with the better setup would win an encounter twice as often.
You also need to know about all of the configuration steps to maximize advantage.
What might look superhuman on youtube for instance may very well just be a good setup.
> I would guesstimate about 100% more effectiveness compared to a subpar setup. Meaning all else equal the guy with the better setup would win an encounter twice as often.
What does that mean? You mean if player A can beat player B 70% of the time, then once player A upgrades his equipment he'll beat player B 140% of the time?
Do you mean that if player A can beat player B 20% of the time, then after upgrading his equipment his win rate will jump to 60%?
Neither of those seems at all plausible, and one is gibberish, but those are the only two ways I can think of to interpret "win an encounter twice as often".
It depends. Being a couple milliseconds faster won't make a difference if your reaction times are a hundred milliseconds slower than your opponent. But there's a lot of junk today that didn't exist in years past. Buy some cheap bluetooth accessories and you might just end up with latency that is orders of magnitude worse than devices from the 90s.
Most of them purposely gimp themselves by running in 4:3. I've watched major tournament losses due to pro players not being able to spot someone they would if they were running widescreen.
I didn't say refresh rate didn't matter. Buy buying a new CRT in the late 90s with a slightly better refresh rate isn't going to be much of an advantage.
The difference was pretty drastic. My NEC FP2141SB in the early 2000s ran 1280x1024 @ 100hz, those Diamondtron/Tronitron tubes were next-level for their time even though they were super finicky.
Yeah the range of CRT quality was huge and visible. Those were a type of product where price actually correlated to quality. With an LCD you could pay $1000 for a "gaming" model and still get something that has basic issues like high input lag or strong overshoot. With CRT it meant the screen is now flat, the image is now bigger than 17", and the focus is now sharper.
They've also got an updated (reverse engineered?) HLDS DLL too. reHLDS I believe is what it's called. Been meaning to check what benefits/cons it brings for my own server.
Probably the mods will need to be reverse-engineered and reimplemented - I haven't looked at how all of this weeks, but there's a reverse-engineered Half-Life engine so I imagine that there is a reverse-engineered Counter-Strike client.dll and mp.dll there as well (compiled down to Javascript or WASM or however it's running).
Oh my god i didn’t think I’d be taking this nostalgia pill today but I’m so glad I did. This show was absolutely foundational to my high school experience haha. StarCraft, CnC, and CS were pretty much my entire life in 2008-2010. What a blast of a time on the internet. Designing maps in StarCraft’s map editor is half the reason I even got into programming in the first place.
I still have a copy of the alpha release version of CounterStrike here somewhere. As I recall, probably as a self-extracting exe but maybe a zip file, and it was about 8 megabytes; that's not quite so amazing as it sounds, as it was purely a mod for Half-Life and sat on top of an existing Half-Life installation.
I should check that it's available in historical repositories and if not, see where I can send it for posterity.
Please do - all the betas have been archived but I don't think many (any?) of the alphas were conserved.
Much like Day of Defeat - only ones of the alphas seems to have survived to the present day.
fy_iceworld was my favorite from 1.6. I recall nothing could touch it with regard to rapid, repeatable chaos. I've probably put 500 hours into that one map alone.
You will find an almost identical structure in virtually every Call of Duty multiplayer experience - One big room with 4 "cubes" in it that players fight around, with various degrees of partial cover scattered throughout.
Sunk so many hours into fy_iceworld. I never enjoyed sitting around and waiting for rounds to end on normal maps. Loved the pace of iceworld and awp_map.
And using headphones on iceworld gave you wallhack like abilities.
I always found it such a shame that a map like as_oilrig never took off in a competitive sense. Always thought "protect the VIP" was a really cool concept, but I guess the rest of the world disagreed.
Oh gosh, I remember long LAN parties on fy_pool_day and the occasional attempt at changing up the go-weapon.
I never played much of the assassination game mode though.
Have fond memory of LAN party. My childhood city had a lot of net cafes, some big ones have 3 floors with each floor about 100 people playing.
During new year holidays, I could spent 10+ hours everyday with my two uncles playing CS 1.5 there, having meals at our computer desks. The contrast between super cold outdoor (-20 degree Celsius) and cozy warmth indoor provides extra sense of satisfaction.
My younger uncle was so good at it that we could hear one frustrated player from another side of the floor shouting at the game server manger asking to kick my uncle’s player out.
I recall installing CS from CDs. I was so excited to play, but my internet was so slow it took basically the rest of the day to download the updates. Then, when I got into the game, some servers had mods and maps to download which took forever.
Needless to say, once I was playing I felt so gradified and cool. My dad brought home a 'flat' CRT a few months later from his work. It felt life changing at the time.
A while later, I thought it would be fun to try out some of the cheat packs.. It didn't take more than 15 minutes for a ban. Still have a VAC ban on record with Steam. 6,400ish days ago. Its an odd reminder, and badge of honor.
At a LAN party I hosted, I'd typically demolish my friends at CS. So one time, unknown to me, they installed a hack on their side (aimbot?) and always started headshotting me. I remember getting flustered (I was and am a competitive person) and then just broke out laughing.
I remember attending a LAN party a friend was hosting (I couldn't bring my computer because it was a family computer but the friend had an extra PC) but because I would just demolish them, they switched my display to a projector that was projected on the ceiling. Still demolished them.
Still have a VAC ban on my account for 5402 days from 1.6. Never downloaded cheats and no idea how I got it. I'm kinda proud of it now but was devastating at the time. Still astounds me knowing that my account has been around for that long.
A cousin brought me a CD with cs beta 0.6, had not heard about the game before that. Spent several days downloading a half life patch on 33.6k modem. Recall having very low fps (p1 133mhz) and 200ms ping.
Also tried out hacks later on but made sure to do that on servers without anti cheat enabled.
Similar, but for HL2. I was hyped for years, only game I've bought on day one. And then it required Steam and I had to download something for two or three days until I could play it, because of 56k.
To me, Rainbow 6: Siege was a good follow-up. They solved a lot of the issues I had with CS (and COD), like stupid movements using jump, nothing to do after you die. They integrated some inevitable things into the gameplay itself: peeking pixels became a legit strategy, and now you can even make your own peekholes because of the destructible environment. You can use fixed and mobile cameras to gather intel, and share that with teammates, even after death. And the gadgets add a lot to game too, in regards to play style. I guess R6 it's not as sterile feeling as CS, so I understand if someone likes one and not the other, but to me, it renewed the fun for a good 700 hours.
When siege is working well and you have a team with you think it's the best multiplayer shooter ever.
They've dug themselves into a hole with the "new operators every N weeks" pattern, but the depth of the game combined with the ultimately mechanical thrill of an FPS is a joy
Yeah it's not without its problems. Inviting the friends into a squad was always a gamble, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. One can invite the other, but not the other way around. We had game-breaking frame rate drops that only went away by applying very heavy handed workarounds. And I hated the "yet another launcher" - I bought the game on Steam.
That said, the game is a unique fun. I'm glad I chose to participate.
This is pretty wild! Seems like it's running the FWGS xash3d engine, which seems to be some sort of rewrite of the Valve goldsrc engine (which I didn't realize had available code to be rewritten)?
I'm curious about how it's actually executing in the browser (WebGL? WebGPU? WASM, even?) but cant seem to be able to get onto a server to poke around at the moment.
That is only the game-logic (which has been 'open' since 1999) and not the engine. That is under a proprietary license and as per terms of the license incompatible with the code that the projects here are using (which are GPL, as they take code from the open-source Quake engines and community projects that have been created over the past 2 decades).
However the projects in question are outside of US jurisdiction for that to matter. They are in violation of id software's and Valve's copyright though.
You can find the original HL SDK license here https://pastebin.com/pAVKk1NL
The copy on GitHub has just a find-replace of the Source Engine license, which is not compatible as well. Seems like Human Error either way.
I have been recently playing CSGO with my family members.
Its honestly very difficult to play, its really not suited for Casual players(playing on speakers with mediocre mice and so on) especially with the very difficult aiming system.
But I didn't find anything that is both free or basically free and can run on everything, from macbooks with Intel/m2 GPU to a gaming PC.
Overwatch 2, too gimmicky and heavy
Fortnite, same thing and we hate battle royal, so no COD WZ2 and so on.
Its definitely an improvement on playing C&C Generals with endless problems that come with a game, which is checks notes 20 years old now.
Someone else mention Urban Terror [0]. Similar in style to CS but fast paced. Also because it's Quake3 based it has all the strafe jumping and highly rewarding movement. Haven't played it in years, but back then it was good fun. Whilst the aiming itself is not necessarily much easier, it is more forgiving. In CS you have one encounter and the round is over for you. With this I'm pretty sure there are various deathmatch modes and much more relaxed respawn rules.
The aim and movement mechanics of tf2 are certainly easier, though the gameplay rules are more complex and there are classes with different abilities and attributes.
> Its honestly very difficult to play, its really not suited for Casual players(playing on speakers with mediocre mice and so on) especially with the very difficult aiming system.
Mediocre mouse or whatever keyboard aren't the only issues I guess. You have to analyze everything about yourself properly to determine when you need a better mouse or not.
I've felt similarly about csgo. It's the game I always come back to when I just want to jump into a game and have some mindless fun. I used it as my tool to separate work from home when the pandemic started. I'd work my 8 hours then play an hour of casual csgo and that helped my mental health a bit.
I had a flashback to the day I figured out that the scroll wheel cancels the reload animation on the guns. I immediately became 10 times better at the game. Also, the zombie servers were mindless but fun.
Wow! this brought back a whole lot of memories. I spent countless hours of my childhood on de_dust, de_dust2, the Italy map and the pool one. I still remember the "Roger that", "Fire in the hole", "Follow me", and so on. Playing this on my constantly-virus-riddled Windows XP computer is one of my earliest computer memories.
Yeah it was a slideshow for me, and no sound. And getting instant headshotted by guys in Russia with 300 ping. I'm guessing they found a way to make it run properly?
edit: Try in Chrome, it is decently playable and has sound, it doesn't work in Firefox.
spent so many hours playing this years ago.. great memories. too bad it doesn't seem to support inverting mouse y-axis or changing keybindings. too much muscle memory to overcome.
I’m pretty sure you can change your controls from the home page (not once you’re in game). Not sure if the settings have inverted y axis, but it had scroll to jump so I wouldn’t be surprised.
Its funny to say but this game has had a huge impact on my life.
I've joined cyber cafes and made life-long friends that last till now, travelled to different countries to play against other teams and won tournaments nation-wide when the main prize was a can of beer and a motherboard.
We used to pick-up our keyboards, discuss mouse DPI and how it influences aim as well as trying to figure out whether 640 or 800 was the best resolution.
I am glad that this game was made, such nostalgia!
Also if someone wants to go down the memory lane remember the golden age of CS movies? Annihilation?
To clarify, this mixes proprietary code with GPL code from id software. Valve has spoken out about the engine used [1] before and has barred it from being used for mods on Steam.
At Planimeter, back when we were "Team Sandbox," we ran into similar issues when attempting to publish Half-Life 2: Sandbox.[1] People can still find the source and game code on our repository listings from when we migrated off Google Code.
Valve Business Development did not give us the go-ahead.
Notably, we were the first usage of LuaJIT in the Source Engine, and we think that later GMod caught up to us. But you couldn't use native Lua modules prior to then. Only with our mod.
Half-Life: Update failed for the same reasons we did, and also our team was in our 20s when we were about ready to publish, too.
Wow! Fascinating. Source needed a open-source sandbox thing from the beginning. Can't believe things went the way it did - but it doesn't surprise me. The original HL SDK license also prohibited you from releasing anything but game-code in object form. Thank you for this effort.
Wow I remember playing around with your LOVE2D engine like ages ago. It was too complex for my usecase, but I remember it being one of the most fascinating projects on the love2d forums.
This game, and map making using Valve Hammer Editor to make aim and surf maps is what got me into programming and gave me a passion for computers in general.
Ah, the nostalgia from the late 90s / early 2000s.
There are entire countries with different standard keyboard layout than QWERTY, I'm pretty sure that 0.1% is inaccurate.
I also remember that some desktop games handled alternative layouts just fine by default, without reconfiguring key bindings manually. I was only ever affected by QWERTZ, so the impact was limited.
Apparently both desktop and web has the suitable API to handle this well, yet web games don't seem to care.
By the end of my CS 1.6 days I loved those Nipper maps, Hookmod, Warcraft mod etc.
It's mostly the console gaming experience has taken over with few outlets for modding. FPS kids these days don't know what it's like to precision aim with a mouse or have a piece of clear tape stuck to their CRT so they can 360 no-scope w/ AWP.
If you played the betas I wonder if you remember beta 7 and the jeepathon2k map. Not many people know that CS had driveable vehicles for a short time. It was pretty silly but a lot of fun.
The vehicle code is still there, just not used by any official map. I loaded up de_jeepathon2k in Counter-Strike 1.6 a few years ago and it worked fine.
Source was a complete mess. It took years of updates before that game was playable competitively -- it never truly was. The half-life 2 engine was a disaster, and most players didn't have the hardware to run those games well at the time. That's what made 1.6 so wonderful - you could run it on single core Pentium 4 processor and literally anything better. For 10 years, it had the best gameplay and a huge playerbase, with entry level system requirements. Many people I knew didn't move to CSS, because getting a $1000 PC was out of the cards - most of us were kids.
In 2007, DirectTV killed the North American professional CS scene by pushing CS:Source into their televised CGS league. The top pro players all left the 1.6 scene for 30-40k/yr contracts to play in CGS (a no brainer)... most of them openly hated the game while playing in this league too. The 1.6 scene in the US was still large and active, but never the same. Teams in Europe, Asia, Brazil & elsewhere continued to play 1.6. After CGS folded in 2008, global competition sort died off and many of he top NA players retired. There weren't many NA 1.6 players good enough to keep up with European pro teams after about 2010.
Imo, CS was an incredible scene from like 2000-2008. CSGO has enjoyed a great run from like 2013-2018?. It's definitely lost steam from the battle royal shooters (PUBG & Fortnite), and now Valorant infringing on it's player base. Valve hasn't really been very active in its own competitive scene, which may also be hurting.
> That's what made 1.6 so wonderful - you could run it on single core Pentium 4 processor and literally anything better.
I played CS 1.6 on a Pentium 1 133mhz processor and no discrete gpu and it worked fine, though I did eventually get an athlon xp 1700+ and geforce 3 ti 500.
I don't think the Source engine is a mess, personally. Even if CS:Source isn't as good as CS1.6, Half Life 2, Team Fortress 2, Day of Defeat, etc. are all solid games that feel good to play. I personally like CS:Source because thats the one I grew up with, it being packaged with G-Mod and all.
CSS got better as it got older, but I heard about grumblings from the 2010 update after I had already quit playing it. I probably played until 2008/2009, and then started CSGO again in 2012 or something.
Some of my CSS memories
- We used to shoot barrels on top of the bomb that would prevent defuses until you shot them off. If you didn't have a grenade or extra ammo (pistol rounds?) this was hilariously difficult. Leagues had to ban this tactic, but there was no setting to just get rid of the movable barrels so it still happened occasionally.
- There was a bug where a players view would sit above their player model - so they could duck behind a box and see over it without being seen. I never learned how to abuse it, but it was obviously very effective.
- Head hitboxes were bigger in CSS than 1.6. The game was just easy.
- The deagle was way too good in CSS.
- Hacking in CSS was really bad. It took a while for 3rd party anti-cheat clients to catch up. League play was plagued by hackers.
- CSS had ragdoll physics instead of death animations. Occasionally players would die while sitting or leaning up against a wall. If you took a quick peek this might make you think it's a player crouching and still alive. The ragdoll deaths made it harder to detect if a player was dead or not
- if they were running at you and died they might still be falling forward in what looks like a running/ducking animation for 100ms or so.
- The maps were needlessly complex. The addition of flower pots, cans, trash, arches, window sills, steps etc etc made grenade physics less predictable. There were times where trash would block a doorway and make entry into a site impossible without sounds from it as you walk over. CSGO has this same problem, even with the chickens. (https://www.reddit.com/r/GlobalOffensive/comments/7ygcve/chi...)
- I remember play shadows being something that was a huge competitive advantage for players with a better PC. If you set your shadow quality too low, you wouldn't see them - and there were certain areas where you could see a players shadow if you had the setting on high.
- Bullet impacts into walls were harder to see because of how "dusty" CSS was. When you sprayed into a wall, the clouds of dust that would come off made it hard to see where the shots were landing. CSGO greatly improved this. (https://youtu.be/Y4TVegjgvXc?t=180)
I could go on - obviously I kinda hated the game, but I also had a trash PC at the time and was fraggin out with 45fps-110fps and a single core processor for a while.
The headshot adjustments were so bad. It felt like everyone in source was getting a headshot. And completely agreed on deagle - you had players _just_ rolling with it the whole time.
One other change I remember is that the AK became a proper sniper weapon. It was a little more uncontrolled pre source.
op implies that after half life 1 engine cs 1.6 it wasn't same game anymore, which is a common sentiment among people who were there. first, besides I think "urban terror" which was a mod for q2 engine, cs was the first "realistic" shooter, so if you played it beta to 1.6 you were part of the creation of the new genre. second, most of the mechanism from half-life engine were still exposed and the path from beta to 1.6 was at least in part about tweaking your cfg to give you a little edge. each new release would nerf and remove some "exploit", and it was kind of exciting in its own way. third, cs after it got bought by valve and later cs:source became big publisher game, explicitly "e-sport", crystallized in the conventions, big and flashy, one of many "realistic" shooters, that came to dominate the shooter genre.
(q2 mod wasn't called urban terror (which is a name of a free software cs remake) but I can't remember what it was called. cs guys originally made "action quake", which was a proto-cs but on quake engine, but I have a strong feeling there was another such mod with "urban" in the name. unlike that anybody who remembers will read this comment…)
ActionQuake2 was a hugely popular mod for Quake 2 and for a while it coexisted with Counterstrike. The gameplay was way faster compared to CounterStrike with itsclassic Quake2 movement.
In the end Valve supported CounterStrike whilst ID software did not support mods at all for their platform which in turn sealed the fate for Actionquake2. There was attempts to port it to Quake3, but the gameplay never compared.
Some of the same people were behind Actionquake2 and Counterstrike and there's an argument to be made that AQ2 was the proto CS game.
yeah I even remember playing actionquake2 in maybe 98 or 99 shortly before cs became a thing. tbh I played it maybe twice, because at the time I was playing q2 competitively and actionquake2 seemed more like a novelty. also I might be wrong, but my impression is that actionquake2 never got big in Eastern Europ: since we mostly played at lan cafes, without internet, you were kind of forced into a handful of games. q2, cs, sc. but I could've sworn there was another mod that had the word "urban" in the name. like "urban assault" or someshit.
I agree. The devs couldn't continue working on CS 1 forever, and eventually a sequel would HAVE to be made somehow. It was never going to please everybody, no matter what they did. Im glad that, despite the controversy, CS: Source still ended up being good.
I remember I got it for GMod, and played it out of boredom one day and I ended up loving it!
You have to remember, these kinds of games ingrain heavy habits. You get a feel for various nuances in the game (eg shooting people through a wall, recoil of a certain people). They may feel surface level but it can be jarring when it all gets changed.
Source wasn't well received by a portion of the community. The community bisected for a while with some folks staying on 1.6. I don't recall everything behind the 20+ year old drama but it was a thing. Source eventually won out and the rest is history.
Don't think Source ever won out, Global Offensive was the game to dethrone 1.6. At least in our "semi-professional" neck of the woods CS:S adoption was 30% at best. A clear majority were still playing 1.6 even when Global Offensive came out, and even then it took a year or two of updates to make that game good enough to start convincing significant portions of people to switch over.
For example in 2011 Electronic Sports World Cup just before Global Offensive came out 1.6 still had a significantly larger price pool than CS:S. Funnily it was also the first and last ESWC to even have a CS:S tournament, even though the game had been out for 7 years at that point.
Cool. Thanks for the history. I fell off CS except for occasional casual sundays and dove head first into MMO land around that time so it's all rather fuzzy. I kinda forgot Global Offensive was it's own release.
source engine is different from goldsrc, and the "feel" of goldsrc goes back to q2 (and some idiosyncrasies from q1). so if you spent several years playing from beta days, or for some people transitioned into cs from even more years of q2 or q1, then source would just be an entirely new experience. there's nothing valve could've done to preserve the right feeling, which is fine. old timers continued playing goldsrc until full blown grown up took over, where's new timers were formed by the conventions of source and further.
I'm surprised is wasn't mentioned yet but towards the end of CS:Source, just before Go, Valve nerfed the aiming and added in randomization to bullets fired that couldn't be corrected for. It was done to make the game more approachable to new players as a skill equalizer.
I'd say Source was great. I sank in multiple thousands of hours in that game - but only playing surf_. (The kind where you had to actually kill enemy players, not the kind where you just surf to a certain platform).
I probably spent over a thousand hours playing 'surf_greatriver2_1'. Absolutely sucked at regular CS, but somehow got very good at shooting with the shotgun whilst in the air.
Nostalgia. CS 1.2 with our family's bad windows 98 PC in the early-2000s was how I got into computers as an 8 year old kid. It was so laggy on our low end PC, it took about 5 seconds to shoot. It was like watching a slideshow presentation with delayed sound. It was until I discovered the internet and browsing around forums, that I found a solution to hack around it. Later I started making bots and mods, getting my first exposure to programming. But that exploration stopped when I discovered a very grindish online game that became massively popular in the 2000s called Runescape.
I got hooked up on this 2 years ago. It got so bad, I had to block the site on the router and use a random password that I put on paper and hid somewhere in the house, so it’d be just too much of a hassle to unblock and play.
One of the only times I got detention in high school was when playing CS 1.6. It wasn't for playing the game, though - our class had done something good and as a reward we were allowed to goof off and play games that period.
But, a classmate had killed me several times in a row and was having a good laugh about it. I gave him a middle finger and then got back into the game.
At the end of the class, the teacher handed me a detention slip and then explained that he had been standing behind me watching my screen when I flipped the bird.
My son specifically got into computer security as he found it more fun to figure out how to get around various security policies and whatnot in his school in order to figure out how to play games (with CS 1.6 being the most popular at his school at that time).
I was interested in CSGO for a while because of the eSport history videos but never got the chance to try it out because my main computer is a Linux and my brother's Windows computer is absolute garbage at running everything honestly. Thanks for this OP!
das gud stuff. man... this game is embedded into my core and nature by now. it just transports me to other times. i cant really describe it with words.
The nostalgia is real with this one for sure. I started playing CS with v1.3, and it is fascinating to me how terrible I still am when I play the occasional round of CS:GO.
I don't think that was true, even the AWP (highest damage in the game) wouldn't kill people if you shot them in the legs or below. I think at least, was a long time ago I last played the game. Scout was even worse, only headshots would one-shot someone.
It was in the beta days. You could camp the long tunnel on dust and every AWP shot to the terrorist feet as they came down the tunnel (before they could even see you) was an instant kill. It was 'fixed' so you had to hit them in the head for a headshot instant kill.
I guess it was "fixed" so that you had to hit them in the body or above, because a body shot with the AWP would kill someone instantly in 1.6, if I remember correctly.
My favorite thing to do in the earlier versions was to "gun-run" dropped weapons back to base, since they did not despawn at the end of the round. So much fun amassing a giant arsenal for your teammates to pick through.
I honestly can't recall when that was fixed. It's just such an embedded counterstrike memory.
My second tech job IT setup an internal counter strike server and a bunch of us would play at lunch or after work until someone yelled at us for screaming at each other over the cube walls.
no, bunny hop is an artifact of quake strafe code, which was retained in valve's goldsrc. it was fixed in Source since it's a completely new engine, but goldsrc counter-strike also had its own mitigations, which I assume were special cased hacks. I played from early beta (russia LAN party "pro" cs player here), and I distinctly remember when bunny hop stopped working. I was running out as ct on de_dust, and went to do a hop and it wasn't working. "they nerfed hopping! the game is RUINED! the casuals won!" etc.
Setting media.autoplay.block-webaudio=false in about:config enables sound for me. Sound is crackling though. It happens when audio output sample rate is not 44100hz according to their forums.
Probably a bit harder - the GoldSource engine had simple graphics (no shaders) so I imagine the rendering could be reimplemented with WeGL or similar pretty easily. Counter-Strike Source on the other hand has DirectX shaders which I'm sure you can get working with WebGL or similar... but nowhere near as easily.
Most FPSs up to this point were SciFi based, guns like the BFG and plasma guns. Counterstrike's focus on realism really altered how you connected with the game. Columbine had happened very recently and was still very much in the zeitgeist. There was a very real cultural attack on video games as a scapegoat for the massacre.
My friends and I would build CounterStrike maps that were the layout of our highschool and would then run around and shoot each other. This was very taboo at the time. We knew that this would be interpreted as threatening by the powers-that-be at highschool, but it was exciting.