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

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1345 points philosopher1234 | 8 comments | 02 Feb 23 16:00 UTC | HN request time: 0.562s | source | bottom
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MuffinFlavored ◴[02 Feb 23 16:19 UTC] No.34628720[source]▶
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

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Waterluvian ◴[02 Feb 23 16:26 UTC] No.34628819[source]▶
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.

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kentonv ◴[02 Feb 23 16:51 UTC] No.34629257[source]▶
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.

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1. Waterluvian ◴[02 Feb 23 16:54 UTC] No.34629324[source]▶
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.

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2. kentonv ◴[02 Feb 23 17:06 UTC] No.34629573[source]▶
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.

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3. rzzzt ◴[02 Feb 23 17:55 UTC] No.34630425[source]▶
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
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4. pprotas ◴[02 Feb 23 18:20 UTC] No.34630827[source]▶
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
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5. florbo ◴[02 Feb 23 18:28 UTC] No.34630977[source]▶
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
6. qup ◴[02 Feb 23 19:02 UTC] No.34631477[source]▶
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.

7. deadbunny ◴[02 Feb 23 19:41 UTC] No.34631971[source]▶
I had the same experience with doom 2; heard an Imp fireballing me directly behind me so perfectly I spun around in my chair.
8. garaetjjte ◴[02 Feb 23 20:02 UTC] No.34632214[source]▶
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.