Lion Doge has spent a year making Inferno destructible. I love this kind of stuff so
explored it to find out how far he’s gone with this.
He has used a variety of techniques, ranging from the simple act of making static props
move, right through to incredibly advanced tricks like simulating mass-destruction.
Starting with the simplest, he has turned a lot of static props into physics-based ones.
This means that plant pots, barrels and watering cans will bounce about if shot or blown up.
In other words: they behave more as you’d expect them to, and in a manner that almost
every game apart from Global Offensive already simulates.
He has gone a bit further with some, like the crates on bombsite A. These don’t just
move or break, but instead split into several parts first, which all collapse to the floor
nicely, altering the gameplay in the process. These coffins at B are another fine example,
though their movement can sometimes be a bit… spooky.
I like what he’s done with the scaffolding in the church- he has connected separate bits
of scaffolding together with hinges which makes them collapse (or not collapse) more
authentically, bouncing about while retaining its shape kind of like a metal structure would.
In many parts of the map he has constructed walls and floors out of several breakable
sections which can be broken off once enough damage is done, which is more like Red Faction
Guerrilla’s approach to breaking stuff apart. It is limited in scope here, but it’s still
a helloalalot of fun to shoot apart a balcony. As you can imagine, this destruction is more
than just a visual effect. You can shoot out balconies, destroy walls and clear cover in
many locations across the map. You can see all of these highlighted in red on the minimap,
which should hopefully prevent you from wasting time trying to blow something up that’s
indestructible. So it means that this map will play differently
from the vanilla version of Inferno. If somebody’s abusing a particular bit of cover, you may
be able to destroy it, changing the gameplay of this map dynamically!
Take Banana, for instance. If there’s an annoying sniper hidden behind the cover at
the top, you can simply blow it up. Or this wall here.
He’s gone even further than that in some places- you can blow out the windows at B,
letting you see through from the church and into the site. And at A, you can blow a hole
through the apartment wall, giving you a sightline across to graveyard.
In apartments, you can blow up doors, gaining access to rooms that are usually off-limits.
You can strip the floor of its top layer as well, which doesn’t serve any purpose other
than to look cool. Hopefully one day the technology will be there to deal this level of destruction
to every surface of the map! I really like that Lion Doge has gone to the effort of doing
stuff like this. In my opinion, bombsite A is the best example of these new destructible
assets. It will really shake up the gameplay in this region, giving players another reason
to load this map up besides the spectacle of debris flying everywhere!
The most impressive addition to this map in my opinion is the addition of pre-simulated
destruction. I don’t THINK I’ve seen this used before in Global Offensive. This was
something that was introduced in Episode 2, and was occasionally used in Left 4 Dead set-pieces.
When it comes to real-time physics, the Source engine is quite limited, and is unable to
simulate hundreds of objects bouncing about or tearing themselves apart convincingly.
So what can be done instead is to simulate it in a third party program, and then to store
it like an animation that can be played when the destruction is triggered. This allows
for large-scale destruction to occur, without requiring much processing power since it’s
all pre-calculated. Lion Doge has bothered to do this for a number
of locations in this map, like on the well, the bookshelves and on tiled sections like
this one here. It’s a joy to watch. The only down-side is that, because it’s pre-calculated,
you can’t interact or move these bits. But it doesn’t matter: Valve, please do this
for every bombsite in every map! It would be a spectacular sight to watch the buildings
and monuments crumble at the end of an exciting round in a tournament.
Just recently, I moaned about how static the bombsites in CS:GO were. A bomb blast in CS:S
would leak toxic gas, or destroy the props the terrorists were trying to blow up, which
made it feel more satisfying when they succeeded in their objective. Thanks to the physics
objects, this version of Inferno brings a lot of CS:S’s appeal back again.
And… there’s one last thing. When a bomb goes off in either site, there’s a 10% chance
that the central tower will collapse, triggering an animation to showcase this mass pre-simulated
destruction in all its glory. Well done, Lion Doge. I like it. If you’d
like to run about blowing stuff up at your leisure with infinite explosives, I’ve provided
a guide on how to do that in this video’s description. I’ve also linked to the servers,
where this map is currently being hosted if you’d like to blow it up with others.