New Counter-Strike: Global Offensive Pics Released

[Hollow]

Yeah. i've watched the vid a fair few times now, and it's pretty bad level design. For starters, why would you ever decide to build a lake cabin next to such a huge rock? I know its part of the gameplay and used as a route to get up to the balcony, but it's totally illogical. I assume CSGO is supposed to be grounded in reality, because you'd never do that in real life (oh hey this seems like a nice spot to build our home, in front of the huge fuck-off rock we can use instead of stairs!) Why not construct a more sensical idea of how to attain access to the balcony that maintains that gameplay idea? (maintenance work/scaffolding because the wood had rot in that specific area and needed repairing?)

Text_Fish makes the point of that its a big open area with one key focal point and no structure, and I agree. i guess it's meant to support the game mode because you need one spot to highlight the action but, the area around the house itself looks like it's too open, seems there is not much tactics involved, except rushing the house or flanking to the right side and taking on the CT's. Nothing is wrong with an open environment but it still needs a structure to support that competitive element.

Lots of little things I've noticed people mention like the pillars on the balcony. it's fine to have the ones supporting the roof connected to the outer fencing of the balcony but to have pillars IN the tight spaces you have to manoeuvre round? Not good. So easy to get snagged if your are back pedalling in a fire-fight.

I'm going to give my proper feedback on friday when they release it in the beta. But there are some quite gaping issues with this particular level currently. it looks beautiful, and I can't wait to convert my map over to the engine, but lets hope the other new additions have more flow and required tactics, because the Arsenal game mode seems like a really fun concept.

[Jasard]

Don't forget some of the most successful gun game maps out there for CSS are completely nonsensical in design!

That said, most are symmetrical in layout at least.

[Gary]

I highly doubt that. It would use way too much bandwidth and power to have so many shadow mapped lights. The omni ones would be extremely expensive.

Honestly, they should just improve their local shadowing methods to HaloReach or UE3 standards. And use a mix of RTT and shadow mapped.

Bandwidth? They are probably just shaders. You know, like doom3 had 25 years ago.

Isn't there some bandwidth use when having tons of lights re-rendering a scene from each light's prospective, getting it's depth, saving it in a 1024X1024 24-bit RT, and repeating this every frame?

[stoopdapoop]

The depth buffer(s) are rendertargets, so they're generated and stored on the GPU and don't hog up any bandwidth.

Biggest bottleneck is actually just generating the depth texture, because you have to run re-run the vertex shader on whatever objects are in light's field of view (unless you use more modern techniques, but source does not), and test for depth on each pixel. One it's generated, doing the depth test on each pixel in eye space is relatively cheap.

and about doom 3, it used stenciled shadows which have some serious drawbacks and basically don't really work for games outside of doom3. On the flip side you do get "basically free" omnidirectional shadows from point lights. Id's say it's a stretch to say that stenciled shadows are implemented as a shader effect, because they have such high CPU overhead when generating the shadow volumes.

[Welsh Mullet]

Omg shadow mapping on the view model. Valve finally turn it on!
They missed it in portal 2... it's one boolean value... thank you valve!

[Zecrah]

More pics for you guise... I also did a *quick* comparison between old and new - I'd left Steam in offline mode on my laptop so I used that for old screenshots. Holy crap it looks insanely better, have to say. Also included a few de_lake ones. I've noticed though that I can't run it on maximum settings like I could on CSS fairly happily - I've had to cut AA to 4x and even disable it on de_lake, which seems awfully intensive for a fairly small map... Water perhaps? Hard to tell also if it's my CPU - Intel Core 2 Duo @ 2.33ghz - or the graphics - nVidia 9800GT 512mb.

Seems to run nicely on my laptop though, which has i5 2430M but an AMD 6470M... Perhaps it's the CPU

Bare in mind in the dust one, the trees are actually swaying. I spent about three minutes staring at them until I got shot back into reality. Arsenal mode sucks at the moment, imo though.

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[Ark11]

They completely re did the look for dust, why didn't they change train, nuke and inferno.

[Dives]

Between the new global shadow mapping and FXAA, I'm really curious about what other graphical upgrades are up valve's sleeves.

[Armageddon]

I'm fairly sure FXAA isn't an upgrade, it's just cheap AA. I hope they still let you use the original MSAA.

[Zecrah]

They do. Or CSAA or QSASASAS or whatever other acronyms that exist. Same shit different shovel.

I like how casually they give the same weight of 'replaced Source shadow engine' as they do 'Updated win round music.' It's great; most companies would make a fanfare and provide documents and crap no-one cares for explaining it.

[joe_rogers_11155]

I think when they say "shadow engine" they are talking about the super-secret engine that they are hiding in the shadows that they don't want anybody to know anything about.

[Gary]

Those shadows... actually look great... I expected so much less.

[srredfire]

Recorded this for anyone who doesn't have access.

[Chrille]

They completely re did the look for dust, why didn't they change train, nuke and inferno.

Nuke and train looked fairly realistic already. Dust looks like an actual middle eastern town now, as opposed to clichéd arabian clay houses.

[Zecrah]

srredfire, it looks almost as if you forget where spacebar was at 1:12

I also suspect they spent the most time on the dust maps - particularly dust2 - since they are probably the most played maps, and dust2 is the most competitively balanced and so they wanted to get them right. They're also very different to the other industrial/corporate/built-up maps that generally exist in CS, such as assault or office or train. They offer a completely different aesthetic scope for Valve to play with.