Welcome to the GotFrag eSports Wiki BETA!
Counter-Strike: Source
From GotFrag eSports Wiki
| Counter-Strike: Source | |
 temporary cover |
|
| Developer: | VALVe |
|---|---|
| Engine: | Source Engine |
| Release date: | August 11, 2004 |
Counter-Strike: Source (also known as CS: Source or simply CS:S) is a multiplayer, team-based tactical first-person shooter, developed by Valve and Turtle Rock Studios. It is a remake of Counter-Strike, the 1999 modification of Half-Life. Built on the Source engine, the game was released in 2004 along with Half-Life 2.
As in the original version, Counter-Strike: Source games pit a team of counter-terrorists against a team of terrorists in a series of rounds. Each round is won by either completing a mission (such as detonating a bomb or rescuing hostages) or by eliminating all members of the opposing team.
Contents |
History
Counter-Strike developers Minh Le and Jess Cliffe, along with members of Valve Corporation and the Day of Defeat team, brought Counter-Strike into the Source engine as an obvious choice for the multiplayer component of Half-Life 2. The game was first rolled out to cyber-cafe owners, and then selected beta-testers a week later, before the gold release, on October 7th, 2004, when it was officially launched and available through Steam (Valve's online content delivery system).
Pre-loading of Counter-Strike: Source to cybercafe owners (as part of the Cyber Cafe program) began on 9 August 2004, being released for play two days later. Vouchers for the pre-release game were available with the purchase of ATI Radeon video cards and with Counter Strike: Condition Zero; the pre-load for these users began on 16 August 2004, with the game again becoming available two days later.[1]
The game can be bought individually on retail boxes or in "game packs" which Counter-Strike: Source come bundled within, with prices varying from US$ 19.95 to US$ 99.95 (digital download in Steam software). [2]
Only days after the initial cyber-cafe release Valve began what would become the first in their long line of updates for CS: Source. By the time of its official release almost two months later, Valve had eliminated numerous bugs and added several updates and patches.
The betas and official release versions shipped with only two player models (one per team) - the "Phoenix Connexion" terrorist (a member of the fictional Phoenix Faction) and the Seal Team 6 counter-terrorist. Being an early version, the player models were low quality and out of proportion, giving rise to being commonly described as having "peanut-heads". Valve released several successive versions of the two original characters.
Around Christmas 2005, an update was released for CS: Source, adding two new player models - the GIGN and Guerilla. This was followed by the addition of the Leet and SAS player models on March 1st, 2006, and the GSG9 and Arctic models on April 12th, 2006.[3]
Changes from Counter-Strike to CS: Source include the improvements inherent to the Source engine (such as better graphics and physics), as well as updated models, animations, maps, sounds, and some small gameplay changes.
Gameplay Changes
Along with many bug fixes and graphical tweaks to the game (HDR lighting for example), Valve has introduced several updates to the game which affect the gameplay associated with the original - the most prominent of these being Dynamic Weapon Pricing and a new radar system.
Dynamic Weapon Pricing
On November 1, 2006, Valve released an automatic update[4] which added Dynamic Weapon Pricing (DWP) to the game. On servers that enabled DWP, the prices of weapons and equipment were dynamically generated based on an algorithm (which was updated every Monday), that was calculated on the global demand for the items and weapons.
More popular weapons (such as the M4 carbine and Desert Eagle) were pushed up in price, while other, infrequently-purchased items (such as the night-vision goggles and MAC-10 submachine gun) decreased in price. In the case of the night-vision goggles, the price was at a threshold of $1[5] for several months.
Three ingame pistols' firepower, the FN-57, SIG P228 and the "dual" 92FS Berettas, were increased as a result of Desert Eagle's popularity and over-inflated price on 'DWP' servers.
Updated Radar
On 24 August 2006, Valve released an update for CS: Source[7] through Steam, introducing what they refer to as an "enhanced" radar display.
In previous versions of Counter-Strike (and in CS: Source up until this point) the radar display only showed the basic location of team-mates (shown as dark blue squares) in relation to the player and red squares if an enemy was "spotted"; any hostages on the map were shown as light blue squares. Also, players' icons of players on different elevations are shown with either a larger or a smaller icon that depends on the player's position in relation to another's.
The new radar took a different approach and overlaid a green-hued, translucent minimap on the screen, with a much more detailed location system.
Teammates are now shown as a blue or red circle for counter-terrorist and terrorists respectively, with a white triangle depicting the direction the player is facing. Bomb sites and hostage rescue zones are now outlined in a distinctive yellow color, and any enemies spotted are marked on the whole team's radar temporarily. Dropped bombs also appear on the radar, and recently deceased players appear as a blue or red cross, if they are on the counter-terrorist team or the terrorist team, respectively. A faded blue or red circle indicates that the players are on a different elevation.
Updated maps
The move to the Source engine allowed map-makers much greater freedom to create more realistic environments for the players to fight in. All of the "classic" Counter-Strike maps, such as the "de_dust" maps, "cs_office", or "de_aztec", were faithfully recreated for the Source engine. Other maps, such as "cs_militia," "cs_assault," and "de_prodigy", had their locations and surroundings slightly changed. The first map available in CS: Source (in the beta version), was the reworked version of "de_dust"; since then, Valve has released the "classic" maps at irregular intervals. Many of these were created by Turtle Rock Studios, who also worked on Counter Strike: Condition Zero.
"de_nuke" (a map based on a nuclear power facility) was the first map to be released with HDR lighting (December 1, 2005), with "cs_militia"' following on 18 January 2006. "de_dust" and "de_train" were also re-released, with HDR lighting passes, in April 2006.
Updated Crouch
On August 24, 2006, along with the new radar and the HDR version of de_train, the 'crouch' of players was changed with the update. [8] This crouch aligned the player's sights when crouched, to the player model when crouched. Prior to the update, when the player crouched, the first-person view would drop far below the location of their head which significantly affected gameplay.
Professional Competitive Gaming
Customization
Because of the large fan-base that Counter-Strike: Source has accumulated, there are a wide variety of different customizations and add-ons that can be used with the game. There is a large fanbase for the game that creates customized sounds, textures, weapon skins, and player skins. However, under the rules of Valve Anti-Cheat (VAC), models for objects within maps cannot be edited, so that a player using a different model other than the standard does not have an advantage over another person.
Maps
There are two types of maps available that come with the game, generally known by their prefix:
- de (demolition)
- cs (hostage rescue)
These map types are created by Counter Strike: Source communities and do not come with the game. Some common maps types are:
- rats (Shrunken perspective)
- hs (Hide and seek)
- as (Assassination)
- aim (Aim Map)
- gg (Gun Game)
- zm (Zombie Mod)
- surf (Surf Map)
- fy (Fight Yard/Fun Yard)
- awp (AWPs only)
- hns (Hide and Seek)
- dr (Deathrun)
- ze (ZombieEscape)
- cl & xc (Climb)
- bh (BunnyHop)
- ba (Jail Break)
- hosties (Hosties mod)
Each type of map has its own goal. In de_ maps, it is the goal of the Terrorist team to successfully plant and detonate the bomb, while the Counter-Terrorists attempt to prevent the detonation of the bomb. In cs_ maps, there are a number of hostages that the Counter-Terrorists must find and lead to the Hostage Rescue Zone. The Terrorists must then defeat the Counter-Terrorists to prevent hostage rescue. as_ maps, removed in Counter-Strike: Source, (although servers that use them still exist) featured one Counter-Terrorist who was a VIP (i.e. the target of the assassination), who had more armor than normal, but no weapons except the Counter-Terrorist starting pistol USP. The VIP must find their way to an escape zone, while the Terrorists try to kill the VIP. aim_ maps are those that are generally all textured in development textures(generic grey, orange and measurement textures), with no objective. These maps are to enhance players speed in aiming, hence the prefix aim. Gungame gg_ is a server modification, where a user starts with a glock, at level 1, and works their way up until the last level (knife level) You Must get a kill with the gun your currently on that level with, or a knife kill on some variations of the mod (which steals a level from another player). Many variations of this arise. Reverse gungame is becoming more and more popular, because you start off with the good guns like the AWP, and the Para machine gun, and towards the end you get the glock, and grenade levels. zm_ Is another mod for some severs. The map starts off by both teams starting off in different areas. Most of the zombie mod maps that are main-stream now are ones like lila Panic, where there are several little rooms, with objects that can seal them off, And the zombies must pull the objects out, or find another way in to infect the humans.
Counter-Strike: Source shipped with 9 maps of the cs_ and de_ types and have since freely released an additional 8 maps of the same types.[1] Maps are frequently made by players from the game, and the easy-to-access Valve Hammer Editor allows anybody to create their own. The number and types of custom maps (and custom map categories) for the game is constantly rising.[2]
Counter-Strike Source was largely criticized by the competitive CS community upon its release, deeming it unworthy of competitive gaming due to seemingly poor code optimization. In 2006, a small part of the community under the leadership of Al “Drax” Mendoza, took it upon themselves to create a mod for Counter-Strike Source which would emulate the old versions of Counter-Strike that put competitive gaming on the map. This project is called CSPromod.
Modifications
Like many other modern first-person shooter games, Counter-Strike: Source has been heavily "modded" by its developer community. Server-side gameplay customizations are typically implemented using Valve's Source SDK for Server Plugins, in the form of plug-ins. Server-side mods like SourceMod and EventScripts build on to the basic RCON commands as well as with the gameplay customizations. A popular SourceMod plugin used in Australian CEVO matches is GotGames WarMod, which automates most of the competition process with a Ready System and Statistics.
The Quake Sound Pack is a popular game sounds pack available with SourceMod. The sounds includes clips such as "First blood!" and "Holy shit!", and are all from Unreal Tournament 2003 (in spite of its name, "Quake" Sound Pack). The only sounds from Quake are "Prepare to Fight!" and "Humiliation".
Unlike the normal game modes which are objective based, Deathmatch (DM) games are exactly as the name suggests - the only goal for the players is to eliminate as many opposing players as possible, although defeated players "respawn" instantly, as opposed to at the start of a new round. Players of Deathmatch maps are given the choice of guns, and can change them once per round.
Similarly to DM games, Gun Games (GG) are a modification to the normal gameplay format where each players goal is to advance through the levels of weapons by killing the opposite team. GG's can be played in a a DM style where instead of having to wait for the next round to commence to respawn, the player will restart playing instantly after death, adding to the pace of the game.
Skins/Models
The ability to add new models and skins using the Valve SDK to Counter-Strike: Source allows for a large amount of customization. Skins (or textures) refers to the actual images applied to parts of the game — the player models, weapon models, and even maps themselves can be "reskinned" (or "retextured") by anybody. Models refers to the actual 3D-elements displayed on screen - VAC offers a server side variable to ensure only certain models and materials are used (enabled by the console command "sv_pure 1") intending to stop material based wallhacks etc. however, not all servers use these limitations as they are optional.
Models can be changed either by the player by adding files to their cstrike folder, or by the server they are playing on using a server side plugin such as SourceMod. The difference is that if a player changes a model on their own machine, only that player will see the changes; However if the model is altered by a server-side plugin or tool, then the model that the player wearing is seen by everyone on that server at that time but the player can also edit those models too.
External Links
FPSBANANA - maps, skins, GUIs and more!
GotFrag's - Counter-Strike: Source section
|
|
|
|---|---|
| Half-Life series | Half-Life (Opposing Force, Blue Shift, Decay) · Uplink (demo) · Half-Life: Source Half-Life 2 (Episodes One, Two, Three) · Deathmatch · Lost Coast · Survivor (arcade) |
| Counter-Strike series | Counter-Strike · Condition Zero · Counter-Strike: Source · Counter-Strike Neo (arcade) Counter-Strike Online |
| Day of Defeat series | Day of Defeat · Day of Defeat: Source |
| Team Fortress series | Team Fortress · Team Fortress Classic · Team Fortress 2 |
| Other games | Deathmatch Classic · Left 4 Dead · Ricochet · The Orange Box |
| Soundtracks | Valve Soundtracks' Tracklist |
