Hello children. You wouldn’t have seen my last video because it’s been age restricted
by youtube. But it’s a great video and I want you to be able to see it. So I proudly present to you:
5 Cool Things About CS:GO, the Child Friendly edition. This video has been carefully edited
in ways that you won’t even notice in order to remove anything that may be offensive or
entertaining in the slightest! 1 : RAGDOLL INTERACTIONS.
When enemies fall asleep in CS:GO, they nap on the floor. Multiple sleeping enemies would sleep
inside each other. Which isn’t very comfortable for them! But sleeping people in Counter Strike
2 stack on top of each other, which is MUCH more comfortable for all involved! I have
already been asked to see how large a sleep over I can make, it’s high on my to-do list and I’ve
already spent an embarrassing amount of my time trying to do exactly that. But it’s one of those
things that is going to become much easier to do once we gain access to other gamemodes and
to the game’s mapping tools. Watch this space. Number 2 : Source 2 can make things SHINIER
With the keyword being ‘CAN’. Just look at the paint-gun models. They’re shinier, aren’t they!
Shame about the map. Because of all the beautiful, shiny maps we could have got, they gave us… Dust.
It’s in the name, isn’t it. Even the stuff that SHOULD be shiny is dulled by a coating of dusty
thick, dusty dust. What a shame. You’d think there would be SOMETHING in this level, wouldn’t you.
Even these binbags, which were previously shiny, have been made into weird mushily textured potato
sacks. Which is RUBBISH! And a big step back, if you ask me. Or anyone with eyes.
Remember all those lovely shiny tiles from old-old Dust2? That would have been the perfect
showcase for CS2’s new lighting effects! Only not, because all we get here is dust.
Windows hint at greatness, but they’re too small and… dusty to show
the new improved cubemaps well at all. This binocular scope is kind of shiny,
and shows the awesome power of parallax-corrected cubemaps to give
the impression that it’s actually changing based on where you move. But I want more than that!
And the only place with extra sheen that I could find on Dust at all was on these plants! Sure,
they’re too green. But they’re shiny! YOU, my overly saturated friends,
are my only hope. Just look at those shiny leaves! Waxy coatings of graphical goodness!
This is what I’m talking about. This is the future of Counter Strike right here:
shiny, and way too colourful. Don’t believe me? Look at the maps Valve’s teasing at! Those
receiving proper make-overs are going to be covered in gorgeous, PBR materials,
reflecting all sorts of stuff, whether you want them to or not. And water! That stuff
can be shiny too. These maps are all going to be so shiny. And colourful. And shiny. And colourful.
Giving us Dust. What were they thinking. But at least we get number 3: C**ktail graphics!
With hindsight, Counter Strike 2 was hinted at almost 3 years ago and we didn’t even notice!
Soon after Half Life Alyx came out, one of the devs said they had spent a good part of
lockdown working on a clever ‘Jesus Juice shader’ for Half Life Alyx. And it is SO
clever! It looks like it’s liquid in a bottle. But it isn’t: the bottle is still an empty,
solid thing. It isn’t even transparent. It’s just a VERY well done shader effect,
which is applied to the surface of the bottle, using cubemaps and stuff to mimic the reflections
and the light that’s coming through the bottle and so on. Yet even knowing all this, it still looks
good enough to trick me otherwise, and I suspect will fool many other people over the coming years
who will be absolutely CONVINCED that CS2 has a real-time fluid simulation going on every time
somebody whips out a Molotov c**ktail. No, don’t be silly. They only have that for smoke grenades.
I spent many happy hours waving bottles in front of my face when this feature first
came out for Half Life Alyx, but even back then I thought it was odd that so much work
went into something for a game that was already out. I just wrote it off as Valve being Valve,
doing Valve-y sorts of things. But now that this exact same technology has made it to the Molotov
cocktails in Counter Strike 2, I wonder if that was the intention for its development
all along. The effect is still better in Half Life Alyx cos you can shake the liquid up,
and it sloshes about much more and even gets a foamy layer on the top,
provided the contents is a fizzy lemonade instead of a greasy looking spirit. As it is in CS2.
Number 4: PARALLAX BULLET HOLES. The bullet holes in CS2 look 3D!
This is best demonstrated on metallic surfaces, where the middle of it appears to go in, while
around the edges it sticks out slightly. That’s awesome. But the illusion breaks very easily if
you start to look at it side-on, where it becomes clear it’s just a load of layered, 2D images.
Right, that just isn’t on. VALVE, stop making decals fade out! I saw it with the paintings
later on in this video, but removing bullet holes? How are we meant to do detective work to figure
out where our teammates were sniped from earlier in the round if the evidence simply evaporates
away after a couple of seconds? UNACCEPTABLE. Valve, pls add an infinite decal graphics option.
I beg you
You can also break it by shooting on the very edge of a wall like this. Yes,
I’m sorry to be already ruining a game for you that isn’t even released just yet!
No I’m not.
So how modern is this effect? Well, I remember first seeing it in the game FEAR,
which is a game from 2005, I was absolutely terrified of that game yet still forced myself
to play through it because the bullet holes looked so damn good. And ridiculously oversized.
Splashing a player with red paint looks cool. It ISN’T 3D, but something about it has to be
because you can paint the same spot several times and the paint splatter gets bigger, you
can connect dot to dots up to each other and the surrounding ‘matter’ gets normal-mapped to give
the impression that it’s nice. Well done to Valve for finding a solution more youtube restricted
than the standard old paint spatter. Next they should add Left 4 Dead style holes in things!
Paint spatters take a fraction of a second before they reach the floor,
which is awesome cos it looks like they’re literally splattering and PAINTING the floor red,
but like I mentioned earlier, these details now fade out after a couple of seconds. Which
is WAYYYY too soon. Especially since rounds of Counter-Strike only last a couple of minutes.
At least let them remain until the end of those? So it seems like there several ‘tiers’ of Paint
spatter: because some fade out almost instantly, while others remain ALMOST
indefinitely. It requires further analysis. Which I can’t wait to do!
Number 5: MODULAR LEVELS. This is by far the most important **** I’ll
talk about in this video. It’s just that its benefits are more likely to be felt by Valve,
rather than the players who will take it all for granted. Right now, Counter Strike 2 only contains
one map. Which as you know is Dust 2. But open the console up and you’ll see dozens that you
can load. Some of these just seem left over from developing the game, others seem completely empty,
others completely broken, another shows some of the fog and lighting effects. There’s one for
Dust2’s skybox, which you can load up separately and fly around. Now this is a change from how it
was done in Source 1, where the skybox was still loaded with the main level but situated somewhere
beyond the playable space. Now, it’s completely separate. So it seems like the concept of a ‘map’
is a lot more modular now, with several often being loaded at once! Kind of like ‘instances’
in Source 1, but for EVERYTHING. With many serving a purpose you’d not normally associate maps with.
There’s a map for ‘buy menu’ which is just a guy stood on a really pretty-looking floor
texture. Is this left over content? Or essential to get CS2’s buy menu working?
There were signs that Valve was going towards this modular approach in CS:GO,
what with the map veto screen being its own map, and with the main menu item showcases. But Source
2 takes this to the next level. Literally. I have no idea what this could mean for the game,
but since this is my video I’ll speculate: In a single player game, maybe this could be
used to load the next area up in advance so that you don’t require a loading screen! When I think
back to it, Half Life Alyx still had loading screens, but while you waited you were still
in a 3D room that you could look about. So maybe these counted as being their own levels as well.
And I’m still REALLY interested to see how Valve intends to do water reflections in Source 2. I’ve
browsed EVERYTHING we’ve been seen about CS2 so far and NOTHING shows what I’m looking for. They
can get away with cheap little cubemap reflections on damp surfaces or puddles, but on large bodies
of water, like CANALS, I expect real reflections of some kind. Source 1 did this by creating a sort
of second render of the level, but from another perspective to represent the reflection. So maybe
Source 2 will literally use a second level to make the reflection with, perhaps being a low-quality
version of the map that you’re currently playing. And within CS2, there’s already the grenade
throwing feature, which displays another view of the map in a box
on the screen. So the technology is there! I love that the graphics menu displays a small
level to preview the changes that you’re making to the game. And it’s cool that when you change
graphics settings, it changes them instantly so that you can see the difference it’s made
to the game, and rather than having to apply those changes with a button at the bottom,
you instead just have a discard button if you want to revert back to what you had
before. Which is much more user-friendly! So these modular levels stand to be a
really big deal! Something tells me we’re barely scratching the surface of what they can achieve.
Now I’ve got some good news, and some bad news. The good news is: this video was originally a TOP
10! So I’ve got another 5 exciting things to talk about, which I ranked higher than these
ones. Although compared with the modular levels they’re all rather superficial. The bad news is:
this video has taken far longer to make than I expected, so you can imagine my disappointment
when, after having spent my entire WEEK END making this, in the early hours of Monday morning when I
finally finished and released it and crawled into bed, Youtube almost immediately emailed
me telling me they won’t pay me for this video, and age-restricted it to limit its
viewing reach. Hence why this child friendly edition was needed. Because of all this stuff
you’ll have to wait EVEN LONGER for my next video, covering all the other cool
things I’ve noticed about Counter-Strike 2. Don’t worry: these are all a lot more child-friendly.