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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.

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.

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

Ah yes, forgotten artifacts of an innocent past.

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.

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

   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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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/

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...

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.

And more importantly for gaming, low latency.

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/...

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?

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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

> 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.

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.

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.

>"...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.

>>> There was a small netcafe nearby when I was young that had a good quality T1 connection and hosted their own CS servers

PC Bang in Columbia MD circa 2006! $3/hr. Spanking fresh GeForce 7900s.

Starcraft was really why every one showed up though ;)

Nice! I've always appreciated how moddable games like this have traditionally been. I texture-mapped? skinned? myself and my friends onto the models in the Counterstrike installations we had on the four computers we kept LAN'd together in our apartment.

Well. We only ended up playing with them a couple of times, because it ended up feeling uncomfortably gruesome - shooting and and killing your friends in cs_italy or whatever.

Mapping out familiar buildings and locations? A much less traumatizing use of time and resources. Kudos.

I, too, created a 3D model of my high school... a little "I am Spartacus" moment on Hacker News.

Ha! Same here it was about $3/hr but you could also buy a monthly thing. It was about 2002.

Everyone showed up for CS or Red Alert it seemed!

There's got to be a name for this phenomenon where people focus in on a pattern that may be consistent between events but is actually an incredibly common set of factors that it's totally nom-predictive.

It is an error in Bayesian reasoning. All high school shooters play violent video games, but not all kids who play violent video games are going to shoot up their high schools.

Making maps for Half-Life and Portal is what lead me down the path to become a software developer.

I was never that good a mapper but it got me into computers in general.

If I had never discovered Hammer Editor on one summer afternoon in 2008, my life would be SOOOO different

For us it was Starcraft and Need For Speed.

I did this and showed my school’s head of ICT (in the UK, where there’s near zero threat of shootings happening) and they were just happy I was doing something to keep myself out of other sorts of trouble, if anything.

> 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.

People just don't understand how good reaction times are for teenagers - even in your twenties it's already getting worse!

Indeed - Tom Clancy wrote Debt of Honor long before 9/11, and Rainbow Six long before COVID.

You should've tried Doom over dialup :)

> a "de_" style map

Those prefixes indicate the map mission type, not a style. "de" indicates a demolition or defusal mission. The actual official map name is what's after the underscore. I think there were only those and the "cs" "counterstrike" hostage maps at the start.

My journey started with Action Quake II mod, which was an action-movie inspired mod (complete with Lights, Camera, Action when a round starts). I wasn't too thrilled with sci-fi style FPS games, they held little appeal to me, but I easily logged a thousand hours on Action Quake. Then moved onto CS and BF2 from there. There went my high-school years!

I don't think gp necessarily contradicts that. Maybe just difference of word choice wrt "style"

Counter-terrorist win. ):

I finagled 512kbps SDSL from a startup telco for $70/month in 1998.

It's all about Doom over null modem.

Counter-argument, before CS (CounterStrike) the predecessor we played a ton of was multiplayer Goldeneye 64. The guns weren’t super realistic, but it also wasn’t a giant leap to CS. The big thing with CS was the online multiplayer with low lag, and it was popular enough that you didn’t have to wait long to join a room - which was a whole lot different than having friends over and playing couch multiplayer.

So many sleepless until sunrise LAN parties.

I remember being so enjoyed by the inability to walk into buildings and shoot from there that I tried to build a whole map full of office buildings. Don’t think I ever got further than a single building and a parking garage though.

It’d be nice to see that again now…

You could memorize the map by walking through your high school though.

It seems like this is something that happens in every high school. Our School was a Quake 1 map however.

P(A|B) != P(B|A)

Logically, it's affirming the consequent.

I could easily see it being predictive. Not the violent game part, but the map editing. Conducting surveillance, and acquiring maps are well known important steps in evil-doing. It helps with playing around with various scenarios, figuring out your pathing, first open fire there, then fire a bit there, then exit through there. Police likely to come from there, taking them x minutes. They could be stalled by doing y. Etc.

I remember thinking the T1 that lit up my entire school district was insanely fast. That was until I went to college and found they had a 2Gbit fiber optic Internet2 link on campus. That was mind blowing.

BF recreated his house and the square in front of it in hl2. He added secret room to his house. We only ever played it 1vs1 but it's one of my top 5 FPS memories ! The fun came from walking in a setting I knew and recognizing it as "our" immediate surroundings. It was not about killing each other, though blowing up part of the furniture in the house was fun.

I didn't like playing with people who were too much focused on killing+owning/taunting other players though, it was (and still is) my limit.

So, you don't remember "es_", hmmm ? Tss, tss.

Yeah I remember having to buy half life and there wasn’t any recoil yet! Haha. Good ol’ cs_assault days.

I have a similar story from a pc gaming cafe. Someone became convinced I was cheating and pulled a knife out on me. Strange times.

That is correct. The pedantic and accurate term would be "objective" since they are basically modify the win conditions of the round, but I chose to use the word "style" because it comes down to how you want to play the game.

There are many players that play "cs_" maps where you're technically supposed to be grabbing hostages and returning them to the spawn zone, but many players chose to play those maps in a different style where they just eliminate all the other players or run out the timer.

Likewise on "de_" maps you're supposed to plant the bomb, but instead many players choose to simply use the bomb to pressure (by essentially tricking the enemy into thinking you care about the bomb) people into situations and trade out kills.

Yeah, my buddy and I mapped out a lot of the school in 3dsmax for our 3d/computer class. We never did anything with it because, well, yeah. We REALLY wanted to make it into a Counter-Strike map but I mean, you can guess how that would have gone. It sure solidified our grade in the class though, we took photos of the vending machines, lockers etc. and texture-mapped them onto the geometry we built out. Seriously fun project.

> Drawing a map, recreating it inside a first person shooter, then spending hours playing (training) memorizing the map?

Right, because if they couldn't practice on a computer, schoolchildren would have no idea how to get around within their own school.

It's usually presented as a group of "red flags" that sound rare in summation. Everyone knows kids play violent video games. What I see among school shooters is things like, has threatened classmate in the past, is on anti-depresents/in therapy and played violent video games.

Some of those things may indeed be a factor in the actual event so it might actually have _some_ merit to bring up but I also probably just described ~5% of kids so it's not at all useful for predictability but it's presented as a "we should have seen it coming" or "why didn't anybody do anything!?".

The violent video games thing is nothing more than a panic but mental health issues and a history of actual violence are the actual ingredients of a mass shooter, it's just not predictive.

I hope that makes sense...

Diablo 2 in HC over dial-up in South France was fun, especially with the random disconnection that was plaguing different providers...

But since so many people have done this and not shot up their school, how predictive is it really?

> 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.

I'd like to point out that "legal" means "not forbidden by law", which in our default-allow mode means "no law exists that prohibits it". This affects both criminal charges for playing CS in a school-like map as well as the behaviour of the school in response to that.

The correct way to assess legality is therefore not "anyone could see" but "is there a law that prohibits it?"

(Note that the hurdle to expulsion may be lower than for criminal charges.)

vip_ was another early map type that existed pre 1.6.

Duke nukem 3d. Dialup. Wow thats pure nostalgia!

Very similar story here.

Doom was ok over dial up computer to computer. Quake was even slow connected direct over modem. I would guess the slowness was the extra data for the 3rd dimension going over the wire.

How did they even find out he made the map? Was it published online?

I remember the day I got ISDN at and I could listen to an MP3 as fast as I could download it (if it was encoded at 112kbps...)

It would go out of sync and switch to single player.

To be honest, it used to be.

I have never, ever seen pings as low as the ones I've seen 15/20 years ago when playing online.

I remember when I played Counter Strike 1.5 or 1.6 on a 10 MBit fiber which was very new at the time and pinging on servers nor far my house (few miles) even sub 10 ms. Those were numbers that competed with lan servers over ethernet.

Nowadays I have a much better connection, and yet, I rarely see myself with such a small latency anymore, it's at least twice that.

Nope. I just remember the early versions. I didn't get hooked--stopped well before it was moved to Steam, which I thought was bloatware (and it was back then). My younger brother was obsessed with it for a while, though.

was asked and very tempted to create a map of my school back in the day, but awareness of the ramifications stopped that from happening. additionally, the powers-that-be were very incompetent, especially in regards to judging these kinds of situations

My memory was marathon on the Mac played over a similar connection speed. I forget the software but it allowed a networked game to be emulated over a PPP dialup session.

Fondly look back at those times, indeed.

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

Same except in Age of Empires 2. We got in minor trouble for it.

I miss making CS maps. Was a great creative outlet for one to enjoy with others.

The drugs more than the "mental illnesses" contributed to the shootings, it is theorized.

Charles Whitman conducted a mass shooting in 1966, and the supplies he hauled along with his guns and ammo were Dexedrine and Excedrin.

Once upon a time, antidepressants carried a black box warning that they may cause homicidal ideations. That's right, not merely suicidal, but homicidal. And many psychoactive drugs actually work to cause the symptoms they purport to alleviate.

It is alleged, perhaps by conspiracy theorists, that pharmaceutical and psychiatric evidence in the Columbine trials was actively suppressed. Who knows?

But it's an interesting synergy that every mass shooting is followed by political calls for "more mental health care" which translates to more budget to put more people on drugs, so if the drugs are causing the shootings, then you have the perfect storm, don'tcha?

I agree about the big comercial servers/games. The community driven servers are often better latency, e.g. I got 7ms in this game, the same server was 60ms when gaming through the VPN and enterprise proxy.

Quake even synced gibs

This is off topic (because the current comment is just fine) but can you please see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34673344?

Sorry to make this an "old-off" but I played Action Quake, a Quake II mod that was how you described your CS experience. An interesting feature on Action Quake that never made it to its modern counterparts was being able to jump into an enemy to perform a kick attack. It's also my first experience with friendly fire. I had a blast playing online with Action Quake. That was probably the time I realized mouse + keyboard was far superior to keyboard-only.