[Music] CS 2's Workshop Now features this custom map made by CZ xa1 and it's called Lost Coast I know it isn't anything to do with that Half-Life 2 lost coast expansion but it looks like some people are considering this to be the most beautiful cstr 2 map made so far thanks to its utilization of the graphical Holy Trinity being water sun and highly detailed assets as the Negative Nancy party pooper FY Miser that I am I will say that to me it being just a map with a few High detailed assets dotte
d about means that it isn't the most beautiful map for I value verticality small touches and carefully constructed scenes which this map doesn't really have oh no some of the Rocks aren't solid and none of them have smooth clipping which can make navigating them an infuriatingly bumpy jumpy humpy lumpy experience it makes me appreciate the official maps and their looped up edges a lot more and there are quite obvious graphical problems with the placement of some of these props some invisible beh
ind the scenes geometry and stuff like that and once you've got over the gorgeous detail that's on these rocks you'll see that they are still just rocks the same few rocks copy and pasted over and over but so what for it's still a gorgeous backdrop for weapon showcases I expect to see this map being used countless times over the coming years for that and it also serves as an early tease of what maps from Counterstrike 2 could potentially look like now I thought I recognized these assets from som
ewhere and sure enough they're from quicko which is a massive collection of super high deal assets that are all free to use in the Unreal Engine but this isn't unreal this is Source 2 and after so long stuck with Source One I still can't quite get my head around the fact that Counter Strike now supports high quality assets that actually hold up to present day standards so yeah in short lots of pretty rocks but comparison is the thief of Joy so let me ruin all this for you by showing you how far
behind the curve Counterstrike 2's Graphics still are check this out so we've seen unreal assets used in Source 2 and now we see something that looks like Counter Strike being used in the unreal 5 engine and as similar as it might look to the CS2 version of Inferno or Italy this was made back in 2021 2 years before CS2 was even announced so any similarities with Counterstrike must simply be from both of these game engines gradually converging on being able to display how Italy actually looks yet
even knowing this time and time again when playing this demo I saw things that my brain was all like mate this right here is from Inferno and they kind of are but the ones here are so much more detailed you can literally zoom into individual items of fruit and further still into individual Bubbles and spikes on those pieces of fruit counter strikes on the other hand is more like but like two polygons at least it'll run fast meanwhile this Marketplace is almost 5 billion polygons billion thanks
nanite but I'm cautious about saying that even this is enough because I've been thinking we've had enough polygon since way back with the Unreal 2 engine back in 2003 this game could render tens of thousands of polygons on screen at once which at the time I thought was enough triangles to make even the most complex and mysterious shapes appear believably smooth and round but of course a showcase like this has different priorities to a game like Counterstrike here we're seeing a Showcase of Cutti
ng Edge models and realtime lighting and this single area alone takes up 23 GB compared with 34 GB for Counter Strike 2 in its entirety this is a game that wants to remain as accessible to as many people as possible and that means keeping system and storage requirements low relative to the hardware at the time because what we get now in CS2 would have been been considered lavish excess 25 years ago and people back then would have been right to say that complex 3D Sky boxes and fancy water effect
s had no place in a competitive game like Counter Strike in fact quite a few of you probably still believe that but of the fancy effects that CS2 has I feel like their visual impact punches well above the performance penalty that they come with but I do think we've reached a turning point for video game graphics and how Counterstrike 3 could look is anyone's guess R Racing probably but our poly Count's going to keep increasing or would our games all eventually be streamed over the Internet like
Google Earth is where no matter how close you get to stuff it can always load up more and more detail or is it all just going to be replaced by neural networks that can generate increasingly detailed surfaces as you zoom in closer and closer to your teammate's face we've got all that to look forward to but for now let's just enjoy these pretty rocks
Comments