Valve releases Counter-Strike 2(store.steampowered.com) |
Valve releases Counter-Strike 2(store.steampowered.com) |
The developer in me find it weird that they didn't make a new database record for this internally.
That's because in previous CS games there's always a chunk of the community that wants to stay behind for whatever reason. Valve doesn't want anyone on CS:GO anymore, so they just updated all copies to CS2.
For what it's worth Dota 2 lives in \Dota 2 beta\ because they didn't want people to redownload the game after launch, and probably didn't want to break things by messing with paths for cosmetic reasons.
"SeniorThesisPresentation_Rev3_7.23.09_finalfinal_ReallyThisTime.ppt(2)" lives on.
The 'steamcmd' tool used to manage servers uses the same IDs.
The configs probably differ, that'll be fun. My client config seems to need updated, it's not executing.
Edit: For those with custom client configs, they used to go here, under the 'Counter-Strike Global Offensive' dir:
csgo/cfg/
game/csgo/cfg/Hope it's a nice upgrade for the people who enjoy it! Good to see it has a native Linux build as well (I know all Valve games do, but in my experience native builds don't always work as well as the Windows versions under Proton).
Edit: I installed it and lo and behold they have an option to make aiming a hold vs toggle. Now the only barrier is my incredible lack of talent and skill.
The new grenades work so much better. Smokes can give you a small peek, flash grenades feel more fair, molotovs have the right mix of cluttering the view and preventing progress.
Also love small details lile the shading being very dull during the buy time, and likening up when the round starts.
The game feels very tight, and less likely to rely on exploits ("put the smoke on this pixel and crouch here so you can see them!") than before.
On a minor note, I wish Valve's reporting system was a bit more friendly. They could take some UX lessons or two from Overwatch.
85 GB of free storage listed as minimum system requirement?
Granted, I haven't seriously played any major games for at least 10 years I'd say. My occasional playing is limited in time and scope and usually involves reliving some old titles... is this really a new normal? We're also not talking about a big MMORPG with an incredibly wide world... Counter Strike is still a FPS you play on small maps right?
(edit: I just rechecked to make sure it doesn't say 8.5 GB, which would have also seemed a lot to me... I'm really getting old)
The sequels still sometimes offer cool things. BG3 is a very big change from BG2, as much as Divinity Original Sin is different from Divinity 2. It's not like the Calls of Duty.
But granted, that's an exception. Diablo 4 is a soulless cash grab. Payday 3 was a bust.
But there are still plenty of innovative games these days that create new or hybrid genres. Bridge Constructor. Portal. Slay the Spire. Frostpunk. Guitar Hero. Dead Cell. Firewatch. Braid. Human Fall Flat. Among Us. Superhot. Stanley Parable. Viewfinder. Rocket League. Surgeon Simulator. Overcooked. Soooo much more...
Also I can’t comment much about Zelda but it seems comprable.
I wish FF[1] had fared better, but it was too late, especially with TF2 coming as an official title.
There is TF2C[2], but I have yet to try that one. Interestingly, it's still going strong with relatively recent content updates[3]. I'll give it a try, but at first pass, the gameplay appears to deviate too far towards TF2 and away from TFC.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Team_Fortress_Classic
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortress_Forever
2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Team_Fortress_2_Classic
3: https://tf2classic.com/Original Team Fortress fork
Any indication of Linux builds being available?
edit: Updated, looks to be the case!
~ $ file -sL '.var/app/com.valvesoftware.Steam/.local/share/Steam/steamapps/common/Counter-Strike Global Offensive/game/bin/linuxsteamrt64/cs2'
[...]/cs2: ELF 64-bit LSB pie executable, x86-64, version 1 (GNU/Linux), dynamically linked, interpreter /lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2, BuildID[sha1]=108d7ee408eb2e4c1a141bc161d05f1878114cbd, for GNU/Linux 3.2.0, stripped
Same here, actually - no sound. I don't even see the application in pavucontrol; even though the game sees my devices, it doesn't claim them?
Counter-Strike (2000)
Counter-Strike: Condition Zero (2004)
Counter-Strike: Source (2005) (that one is a port to Source really)
Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (2012)
Counter-Strike 2 (2023)
Many years later I tried Hunt Showdown and this is the first time I heard of server side kill resolution. That leads to a insane number of trades where both people die in the game and it also can lead to people killing you after you killed them (that is on your screen anyway).
But what made me really skeptical about this was the how this opens up so much for cheaters, and Hunt did indeed have lots of cheater issues but I am not sure if it was all related to that. I think its more common these days Valorant also has server side kill resolving?
So this seems like a new technique the is like both combined to me but this is just my quick guess, but still this makes me super skeptical because if the client can just claim "I did this at this millisecond" how can the server verify that its all legit?
> to many cheaters to enjoy
Some obvious problems have not been solved in two decades.
I was previously SMFC. People love to call cheats way more often than people actually cheat im that game. People cannot fathom simply being worse, or they cannot emotionally handle it.
No, they should not add kernel level malware to the game.
cheating is not trivial problem that hasn't been solved despite decades of research and effort and
that not everything can be done server-side easily
I hope this can be improved on in future updates with CS2.
(I checked in incognito, too).
and then there's the teamwork aspect (comms, strats, etc...) aka level 2
and then there's the game sense (counter-stratting, countering opponents bad habits) aka level 3
honestly the wall can be less intimidating if you work on your mechanics (level 1), which is the base of all of this
Oh well!
The reason: huge textures, where every detail is unique and that look good up close. Let's say you map the world at a millimeter scale, let's a byte per mm2, 1GB is 1000m2, which is about the size of a typical backyard, small maps are bigger than that, have a bunch of them and you can get to tens of GB easily. Plus textures are not just colors. Normals, material properties, etc... are mapped to textures too.
I don't know how Counter-Strike 2 gets to 85GB, but if you want things to look good up close and avoid repetition you get these sizes. Also, storage is cheap, so if it makes the game look better, why not use it?
Halo Infinite is around 50gb but has compressed textures and audio so it can fit on a blueray disk for Xbox One (the third xbox). It's a very cookie-cutter game and also far far smaller on biomes compared to previous halo games (I think it's only 2-3: mountain grasslands, and desert on a multiplayer map, and interiors if together you want to call them a biome).
PC games will tend not to use compressed textures and audio so the games load faster (they don't need to spend time decompressing) so they can easily reach 85gb. Faster loads is more important in games where there are many matches.
Borderlands 3 and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare are about 135gb.
ARK is about 250gb.
Someone hit me with the trivia: How big was Titanfall 1 initially, with its library of totally uncompressed audio for every localization in the base install?
But, I just installed CS2 and I think it only downloaded about 20GB or so, that maybe decompresses to about 40GB in the end. Maybe someone else can verify what it ended up taking on disk?
I understand you would want to have some leeway so someone playing the game doesn't surpass the 'disk space required' within the first three days just because of a few additional maps/skins/textures downloaded while playing... but over 50 gb of leeway given an install size of 33.6 gb?
Maybe pointing towards something else about gaming I don't understand...
Is it? It seems to be ti be building and iterating on games like the Pathfinder CRPGs, Divinity, and older Bioware RPGs.
And of course Path of Exile is great, it's just... a lot. Steep learning curve.
I'm using pipewire for audio so passing `-sdlaudiodriver pipewire` to the game fixed it for me.
Thank you, that worked! Happy fragging :)
edit: If anyone notices laggy audio, try going to the audio settings and switching devices from 'auto' to the one you want
Have you tried gamescope out, perhaps the '--immediate-flips' argument? That suggests it may lead to/allow tearing - or does it depend on what you're waiting for?
I am certain of this because I climbed to global a few times, and I was tracking VAC bans in my game history. In the top ranks, every other game eventually had a player get VAC ban days or weeks later. In the middle ranks it was one or more players every game.
However the cheaters bothered me less than having to play the team's therapist in every game the moment we lost one round!
1. Cheating is not at all common.
2. Cheaters have low trust factor and you never see them if you don't have a low trust factor.
In either case I'm not very bothered. Don't put malware on my computer because some players haven't spent enough time in the game yet.
CS2 does exactly none of these things and instead keeps the gameplay and social contract largely unchanged. Gameplay issues with smokes have finally been addressed, the game renderer has been modernized, and the playerbase reaction is overwhelmingly positive.
Looking at reddit, it doesn't look like it, but that's just reddit. I don't like it too. It's just a worse-looking, worse-performing game. The gamemodes and maps I liked are gone too.
I enjoy it, they dealt with my major complaint with GO - the colors being dreadful/dreary. I appreciate how things generally feel brighter.
That said, I am having some weird visual things. Dynamic lights and the player contrast/highlight thing mess up smokes pretty good:
https://i.imgur.com/90wpKmO.jpeg
This is on Fedora with Flatpak Steam, latest stable kernel/Mesa.
Performance does need some work; when I manage to get it to actually ignore vsync (hence ~160 FPS), my frame times are all over the place - with a 7950X3D and 6900XT.
Mine was more in the area of 5-10 cm for a single rotation (so that I could use just my wrist for movements), which is almost impossible to properly aim with.
The idea is to do movements with your whole arm and micro-adjustments with your wrist. It's annoying and weird at first, but after getting used to it your accuracy gets an order of magnitude better.
Not sure if that's your case, but thought I'd share if others had this problem.
I always thought I played normal, but I needed this to be pointed out to me.
If no one has ever seen an e-sports player's physical movements, They have very light mice (under 75g), a mouse pad about 1m (3ft) long and move their whole arm left and right to turn their character 180 degrees while using just their wrist and flexing their fingers to fine tune the cursor onto the head for a headshot.
Here's how to improve:
First, start reducing your mouse sensitivity by 1.5 total percent each day. This is so the change is gradual enough that you can keep playing games like normal, but you'll have brought your sensitivity down to a more manageable level. This will also give your body time to build new muscles in your arm that you'll be using for holding your arm out and moving your mouse (you don't tend to use these muscles in anything else during the day. Don't try to skip to the end even if you're fit, because you'll over exert some specific muscles in your arms that you don't use because they're hidden under other muscles).
Once you're at the point where you comfortably need to move your mouse about 60cm (2ft) to perform a 180 in-game, you should start looking at aim-training. There are aim-training games that will teach you how to flick, track, etc... (If you're not exactly sure what these are, you will learn by watching some in-trainer tutorial videos) Aim-trainers are a lot more focused and intense specifically on aiming compared to regular games which means you build up specific skills in them much faster than regular games.
Spend about 10-15 minutes a day in the aim trainer right before playing your games. This will train you, but also warm you up so you're already playing well when you move to an actual game. The aim-trainer will track your performance and you'll notice it gradually trend upwards bit by bit for about 6 weeks.
By this point, you're probably better in some ways than the average player. But you're still going to get demolished by a few specific people you'll run into online.
To start facing those players, you'll be able to go into your aim-trainer (which has recorded all of your stats so far) and see which specific skills you need to practice.
Unless you’re playing a game where you’re literally just using a beam weapon, you’ll likely switch between these aim modes frequently and naturally throughout a game and having multiple sensitivities that you switch between can really fuck up your “intuitive” feel when aiming. In those cases I try to find a happy medium. Something a bit higher than optimal for tracking but usable for flicking.
It helps to know rough timings for where conflicts first happen. You can filter out a lot of this posturing by having a sense of where the other team should be, given timing
For example, in B-tunnels on dust2 in CS:GO and 2. With a decent spawn point, the opposing teams meet at the stairs - favoring whoever was slightly closer. It may be best to simply post up, or push through
I've always been a mediocre shot compared to my peers, but my gamesense and calm nature has made me super useful on invitational teams
If you're into it, just work on consistency - the rest will follow
The time-to-kill is rather low, the victor is [usually] who prepared the most - not who has the best natural aim.
I decide where I go each round by my spawn point - that's one of the easiest advantages you can have; knowing which allows you to beat the other team to a position/setup.
Once that initial fun is over, it's mostly about keeping a mental model of where the other team 'should be', and preparing for that.
Public games are a wild animal, you lose a lot of this 'reasoning' when it's no longer 5v5 or some reasonable number.
You generally assume a 2-1-2 split on the left/mid/right 'lanes' of the map; but some teams may stack when economically challenged. Many pistols beat one/two rifles, and can turn the round around!
not that I know what other games you've enjoyed
But mastering movement is paramount to having good accuracy
There are two options:
1. Have one wide arm movement that turns the player 180 degrees, meaning that when the mouse is centred, the player can turn left or right by 90 degrees without lifting their mouse.
2. Have one wide arm movement that turns the player 360 degrees, meaning that when the mouse is centred, the player can turn left or right by 180 degrees without lifting their mouse.
Different players test each option and all available statistics are measured.
Turns out that option 1 performs much better than option 2.
For FFA (Free for all) games, having a reduced turn, also means that the player is more accurate. In a one on one fight, players with reduced-turn are able to consistently get more headshots (which deal much more damage then other shots) leading to winning more fights. This allows them to charge forwards into and out of fights, as it is unlikely for an enemy to be behind them since they had just cleared that area of enemies by previously charging into it.
For Team games, having a reduced turn still gives you the greater accuracy, but you're less likely to charge in since an enemy team can surround you and hit you in the back. This leads to teams of reduced-turn players remaining near each other in formation. If an enemy enters any player's field of view, they are able to kill that enemy faster since they can consistently get more headshots, protecting the whole team. If an entire enemy team appears together, the reduced turn team will still win because they can still get more headshots consistently. This tends to result in the enemy team breaking formation, allowing the reduced turn team to also break formation charging each enemy. The reduced turn team will then form back up into formation when they enemy team is close to regrouping.
