Play Counter Strike 1.6, with full multiplayer, in the browser

Damn, brings back much memories.

Bunny hop, shoot, bunny hop, shoot

How long has this been out?

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.

Shots penetrating meter-thick stone walls. Good times.

CS before it went downhill. Played so much de_dust (before de_dust2 became popular) from the beta days to 1.6.

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 am not sure if this is made with source engine, would it still have bunny hop if not?

This is my childhood and much of my teenage-hood!

Sniper bullet to the foot just as instantly deadly as to the head too.

When did it go downhill? I thought CS: Source was great fun. Didn't really care for CS:Go

Crashes firefox.

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.

this would have been great during high school. we had to install it to thumb drives in order to play.

Met what ended up being a great friend in real life somewhere in some random IRC room looking for a 5th member to join my friend's group

He had a special CRT monitor to get the best refresh rate to be as competitive as possible for the game

Feels like a lifetime ago

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.

I am running 108.0.1 on nixOS and it played great.

Alright, let's move out.

That's the way it's done.

Owned.

Follow me.

Fire in the hole.

Roger that.

Affirmative.

Ah, negative.

Let's go sir.

Go Go Go.

..... good stuff

1.6 does not use Source. The appropriately named "CS: Source" does.

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.

I think two years.

For the curious, this is based on the https://github.com/FWGS/xash3d-fwgs engine. Probably this fork: https://github.com/icrazyblaze/Xash3D-Emscripten/

I spent hours watching demos of pro games to learn wallbangs (especially de_nuke) and flash spots. Good times indeed! Shout out to HLTV.

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.

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.

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.

Worked for me but without sound.

it's been over 15 years but b43 came back instantly, woah!

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

crases for me as well.

I am running firefox nightly version 109.0a1

Nothing quite like hearing, "Fuck you, you fucking camper" echo across the office floor at noon.

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.

To this day, I still have exact intuition for the time span between "Fire in the hole!" and "Boom".

> but still just used headphones

I haven't thought of Ventrilo/Teamspeak in years...

Wow, this is a throw back! Thanks for sharing

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.

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.

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).

"He had a special CRT monitor to get the best refresh rate to be as competitive as possible for the game"

People like that always trying to compensate for a lack of skill

Eh, my 'nades would get ya

Same for me.

CS:GO is pretty great and still very active

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.

Is this true? I used headphones all throughout my CS days. Stereo sound in headphones was enough to give a competitive advantage.

Ah, yes, the APC was the best way to die in cs_siege

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.

Meanwhile all of the best players in the world are using 240hz monitors…

I wouldn't go that far. Those people are usually still in the top ~5%; just looking for any advantage.

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.

That brings back memories. We put the files on a shared network drive in highschool (windows computers) to which we had access during our IT classes.

We had teachers who'd let us stay in the classroom over breaks to play the game, lol.

still have B32, B14, commacommacomma memorized

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.

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.

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.

What is a vent

108.0.2, also nixOS.

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).

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.

Rampant wall-banging on scoutknivez until people call you a hacker was my personal fave.

Ventrillo, a voice chat program popular for gamers. I guess sort of 2002 era Discord.

Are there any modern games that recapture the same magic of CS 1.6 custom maps?

It feels like custom maps aren't as big a part of gaming now days for some reason

CS made me lose my college scholarship

My favorite at the beginning of the game is "get in position and wait for my go" B-)

^

people forget that CS was a mod of Halo. where of course you could ride a lot of vehicles

You only have ~2 ears, there is no need for 5.1 channel surround sound.

seems like a absurd reason not to like a game, stuck in nostalgia and district elitism reserved for the "hipster" crowd

Probably Minecraft and Roblox mods but it helps to be a kid I'm sure.

I'm sure other people will correct you, but cs was a mod of half-life 1, where drivable vehicles were a massive janky hack.

The original Half Life, including goldsrc, is source-available: https://github.com/ValveSoftware/halflife

Ah yes, I played tons of surf. Got into coding due to running a surf server in my closet and programming server mods.

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.

Unfortunately causes Firefox to crash on aarch64-linux with a Qualcomm SoC!

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.

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.

We only have ~2 eyes, there is no need for a third dimension!

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.

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.

I'd totally forgotten about that! Man that was a mess. A fun, fun mess.

You already get 99% of that "wallhack" by having stereo headphones. The game is mostly flat.

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.

There's at least one public web version that uses Emscripten at https://github.com/iCrazyBlaze/Xash3D-Emscripten

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.

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.

> I never enjoyed sitting around and waiting for rounds to end on normal maps.

Precisely. I found it much easier to get my friends interested in playing CS at LAN parties with this map (or something wacky like jeepathon2k).

You only need a 2D display to create fully 3d images (see the 3DS for an example).

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.

Also sound didn't work at all

AWP, aim, shoot, press q for knife, back to AWP, aim, shoot.

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.

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.

This reminds me of Minecraft in the browser. Was fun to a play a bit in Chrome on Windows.

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.

That's good to know, I haven't been able to try it yet, maybe map crouch to C and use your thumb?

Edit: It looks like it has a notification to use C while in windowed mode

CTRL should work correctly in fullscreen mode

Yeah that's a lot of "gold wire gives better sound" vibes.

Yes, all of that stuff can make a slight difference, but at the end it's not going to be a determining factor in your skill.

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.

More players are playing this version than there are on steam.

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!

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.

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.

>cs_italy

FYI there are AMA thread from makers of it on Reddit somewhere.

A quite fun read.

Oh yeah. Couple levels had the vehicles, I think. cs_siege is the one I remember most.

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.

I just played for a couple of minutes, it's a little rough but still fun.

This is amazing. i can't seem to get the mouse to work though.

Lan party is really the only way to play CS 1.6. Easier to spot a cheater, and then you can all duct tape him to his chair for the rest of the game.

damn, i need to search a mouse...

You can easily create sound in front of and behind you with headphones.

Haha, same here! I loved greatriver (the x_dream one specifically).

I went back to it a couple of years ago, it was all just servers and people with bhop scripts and AWPs.

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.

No AWP servers were fairly common and where I mostly played. Even fixed the AWP never quite felt balanced.

The “perks enabled” icon¹ looks like the Pocket logo²³.

¹ https://i.imgur.com/JKzbRTV.png

² https://i.imgur.com/mqGh2X3.png

³ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pocket_(service)

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

You can just move the mouse horizontally slightly and you'll know the direction of the sound instantly.

Stereo is not for casual play, it's clearly the opposite as here's not a single professional player that uses surround to my knowledge.

The Sierra version of Half-Life had EAX support, IIRC, with strangely long reverberations each time you walked on something made out of metal. claaang

How many pro CSGO players use surround?

If there's ever a case for an Electron app, maybe this is it!

This reminds me of the days when I used to have an ATI graphics card with a TV tuner!

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.

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.

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).

It's exactly this. People blow money on things they think give them even a slight advantage. At least, people who have money do.

Then again, a fool and his money are soon parted.

The web version has around 800 players now.

Steam version has around 14k players right now.

Like with all games and cybersport in particular, that last 0.5% of finesse is all that matters, this is decent imitation but not really CS1.6.

wow -- jeepathon2k made my brain tingle. I cannot believe that I still remember that map.

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.

Unfortunately like 99% of such web games is mostly unusable if you don't have a QWERTY keyboard...

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 have no problem sondhacking with my 2.1 setup.

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.

This gave me a nice nostalgia kick, but I’m not gonna keep playing it for that reason. Not quite CS 1.6

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.

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 know a couple that got married after meeting in CS1.6 Wild!

HAHAH! This is amazing!

I was an avid CS 1.5/1.6 player in the early 2000s. This is def a bookmark!

Yeah, for sure.

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.

I remember the P90 having (almost?) no recoil or spread in the beta days as well. Was like a firehose of bullets.

hahaha, well played sir, well played.

for one it's not a cs 1.6 without crt monitor artifacts :D

A high refresh rate monitor does help in measurable ways.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F2dPIHPNOeY

You don't need to spend lots of money to get 120+hz screens. They can be had for $150 if you're willing to make compromises.

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.

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

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.

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.

Oh man you gotta turn off scroll switch and have specific key binds for every weapon

Do you have a way to see active players? I started up 1.6 in steam a week ago and tried to find servers with active players.

What was wrong with 1/2/3/4 for key binds? I played CS 1.3 -> 1.6 professionally in 2000s, never really saw folks do this.

Hmm it loads wav files for sound effects - is the file size savings minimal at that length?

Accurate positional audio from a stereo source is far from easy.

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

Cs 1.6 and surfs/kz/easyblocks/hns <3

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.

Never played CS in my life, tried this and managed two kills with a MacBook Pro M1 trackpad.

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.

i wonder how hard it would be to make this work for Counter Strike: Source

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).

The best FPS. I've been playing COD on PS5, but it is not the same.

The game play is so much better, and more intense in Counter-Strike:

* Respawn points are consistent

* You have to manage money

* It gets intense when you are the only one left on your team

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.

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.

That's a non-issue. You just need a QWERTY layout. Most OSes make it very easy to change on the fly.

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.

Is this legal? They want my social login for something that might be piracy?

An electron app for cs 1.6? I assume this is sarcasm.

Many people use mouse wheel for jump as well

You don't get it: I WAS there. I'm almost 40. I was playing CS from the very start.

I maintain that the people spending tons of $$$ to try and get an advantage in CS are mostly trying to buy skill, and it never works.

with scroll wheel bound to jump of course

It's even harder with surround setup.

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.

sweet memberberries

This is cool! I wonder what other multiplayer games can be ported to run in a browser.

Why don't web games use KeyboardEvent.code for this? That would mostly resolve the issue, assuming browsers are compliant.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/KeyboardEve...

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.

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.

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 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.

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".

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.

Sure, internet matters.

Equipment matters less these days.

All I'm saying though, is if you're a crappy player, it's not because of your equipment, and buying better equipment won't make you a better player.

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.

What does performance and load look like on a laptop? Anyone have specs?

Could I use this to put HL1 and its mods in the browser for a LAN party?

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.

I ran a 24/7 Iceworld server in my bedroom.

The latency advantage was real.

> My friends and I would build CounterStrike maps that were the layout of our highschool

Ah yes, forgotten artifacts of an innocent past.

Urban Terror it's like CS mixed with Hollywood action movies from Bruce Willis and such.

If you install the page as a PWA then it will be able to prevent those shortcuts https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Progressive_web...

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.

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.

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.

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.

Does anyone know what they're doing for multiplayer? WebSockets or WebRTC?

nice, you even brought my 500+ ping lag back into the mix.

This sounds like a lot of work to me to address a problem that only impacts 0.1% of players, and KeyboardEvent.code looks pretty obscure.

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.

I will concede that for once, Apple's insane keyboard mappings actually work in their favor.

But I still won't get them any credit, since it is purely a coincidence that their mappings happened not to mess with this one browser game.

They could have argued it was self-defense training :)

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?

Why?

Cool, what was your gamer tag and clan?

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.

> it is purely a coincidence that their mappings happened not to mess with this one browser game.

Not really a coincidence and that's not the only scenario where it's preferable to have a dedicated command key

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.

(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…)

Probably because, if you want to have an app anyway, why don't you just install the native game?

I had so much fun playing this as a teen.

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).

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 had the same experience with doom 2; heard an Imp fireballing me directly behind me so perfectly I spun around in my chair.

well that was fun. a little choppy but fun

> 0.1% of players

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.

The reason they run 4:3 on 16:9 monitors is to stretch the horizontal and make their targets effectively larger on their screen.

Obviously that comes with downsides as you mention.

Like Mumble?

Impressing in some sense. But in the end only impressive because it is in the browser.

It lagged way to much to be playable. Also sound seem to be not working.

Playing an FPS on a console sucks, sorry. The best handling it's a kb+mouse because of the precision.

It is not.

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.

[1] http://web.archive.org/web/20160701071741/http://www.moddb.c...

the point of the CTRL key is to send CONTROL messages

anyway, this is just a coincidence, CS was a Windows only exclusive-full-screen game where those combinations had no possible conflict

no one thought we would be playing CS in a browser in the future

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...

doesn't sound so well thought.

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.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interaural_time_difference

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.

> Picked up Call of Duty during the pandemic as a means to stay social with friends

The pandemic had some really good 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 ...

Surround audio using headphones needs HRTF: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Head-related_transfer_function. There is no single profile that works for everyone though, because it is dependent on head and ear shape.

   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.

> Under Windows and even Linux, depending on the app it's probably going to run "select all"

that's CUA. Which is a much nicer and saner standard than Emacs/Vi keybindings.

Don't you think pros would run widescreen if it was an actual advantage?

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.

And so many servers had the Quake sounds https://youtube.com/watch?v=6duy25F8lpo

Really cool in gun game. Also, the vehicle maps were a blast :)

Naive feels like a much better word than innocent.

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).

> 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.

The vsync latency is real and unbearable in some games. I think it uses a queue/buffer for frames which can cause latencies of multiple frames.

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.

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.

[1]: https://github.com/Planimeter

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.

fy_iceworld takes me back!

> a good quality T1

Oh man, I remember the good ol' days, when a 1.5 Mbps connection was unthinkably fast. I imagined only God herself had a T3.

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.

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 still have it, you can view some screenshots and download the bsp here: https://gzalo.com/en/projects/cs_electronicaort/

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.

That was when I discovered the magnificent beauty of symmetry.

There were also several other mods, like medieval one.

> simple mapmaking

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.

https://www.businessinsider.com/fbi-took-lego-set-of-capitol...

COD is a notoriously shitty game. Counterstrike continues as cs:go, and it's honestly a superb game (and a superb esport).

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.

After loading files, the game says: "Initialize shaders, please keep focus on this windows." Nothing happens so I looked at console.

There was: "Exception thrown: Uncaught SimulateInfiniteLoop" Uncaught SimulateInfiniteLoop

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).

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.

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.

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.

amazing, thank you

> both free or basically free and can run on everything

Team Fortress 2 is still alive and well

Don't forget fy_pool_day!

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.

And more importantly for gaming, low latency.

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.

Doubt it would be any easier than CSGO

> 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?

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.

Probably because differences in CPU architectures make that impossible. CS 1.6 won’t actually run on MacOS afaik.

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.

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.

https://oig.justice.gov/sites/default/files/archive/special/...

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.

[0] https://www.urbanterror.info/home/

IIRC Hitboxes were different in the early days which kept many folks on 1.6

It is alive, but saying it's well is a big overstatement. Can't have 10 minutes without aimbots ruining the game.

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.

That window in Italy.

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?

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.

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.

You can play the most recent COD using keyboard and mouse in the PlayStation. Quite a few games where that's relevant allow it nowadays [0].

[0]: https://gamesbustop.com/ps5-games-that-supports-keyboard-and...

Does that count for cable internet too?

We were one of the first to get cable in the area, so our ping was generally about 5ms..

This was when many others were still on bonded ISDN for a (nice stable) ping of about 120ms or dial up (150+ ping).

That made up for a lot of skill :D

I feel old now. Thanks.

I remember pool day now! Definitely played that one a lot too. Also have some memories of oil rig.

Agreed on the hostage maps. TFC had that one map too...

> 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 remember the days when I tried to play Quake on my 28.8 modem over the net pre-Quakeworld.

Almost made me swear online multiplayer off for life.

LPB, Low Ping Bastard.

LTT also tested this for FPS games and both professionals and casual gamers improved significantly going from 60HZ to 144+. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OX31kZbAXsA

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!"

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.

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.

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.

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.

I enjoyed it enough to download Day of Defeat 1.3 again :D

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.

The only cheat I needed was my bindings, which I stored on my website so I could download at the cafe ;)

It's a whole extra button, how is it a coincidence. (Yes windows has the windows button but it isn't a modifier in the same way.)

> 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.

haha! wow memories.

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.

>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.

https://youtu.be/OX31kZbAXsA?t=1911

[1] https://displaylag.com/reduce-input-lag-in-pc-games-the-defi...

[2] https://www.cse.wustl.edu/~jain/cse567-15/ftp/vsync/index.ht...

i'm kind of surprised this isn't considered cheating. It's effectively zooming in.

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

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).

That's a pretty harsh punishment! People would've been permanently in DT at my school..

Cycling through grenades using 4 is inefficient compared to dedicated flash, HE, etc. keys

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.

it crashed for me: firefox on ubuntu

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.

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.

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.

[1] https://www.asciitable.com/

This is really dope. Thank you for sharing! :D

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.

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.

Try zooming in without a right click button. It's fun!

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...

It is in fact, simple mapmaking. And fun. You have to project your own fears on to it to make it any more than that.

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.

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'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.

It comes in handy in terminals as well. You can use CMD + C to copy, CTRL + C to send a code.

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.

I miss those times a lot.

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.

Ah the most famous dot release!

If you don’t have a trackpad, just cmd + scroll?

> 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.

The game ran on practically everything.

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.

Further reading, with demos attached:

https://theimmersiveweb.com/blog

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.

>"...hey didn't know who I was and every time I would stomp them they would yell "FUCK" from the other room...."

I laughed so hard about this, I can picture this in my mind.

Yes, but did they maintain the crosshair misalignment?

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?