Dust2: this current version of the map has been played on by millions of players for
several years.
That’s some serious testing, and despite Valve’s best efforts there are still some
bugs remaining on this old map.
And with a new version in the works, it might signal the end of updates for this older version.
So let’s see which bugs have evaded correction, even after all this time!
Firstly, the boring ones, like bomb stuck spots.
Now I say they’re boring because they’re low hanging fruit for anybody looking for
problems with a map.
With most levels, you can just turn on visible clip brushes, throw the bomb about for a few
minutes and you’ll likely find some.
It’s inevitable when there are thousands of decorations on a map.
There’s no simple solution to this either, as a mapper you just have to do the best that
you can and then to fix any that the community picks up on.
And Valve’s defence, they’ve patched Dust2 up pretty damn well.
Even in the last few months they’ve fixed a number of these bomb-stuck spots which I’m
showing you right now!
These were all potentially round-breaking bugs that remained in the game for about 4
years.
The difficulty is that as a mapper, if you make all props non-solid then yes, it will
stop the bomb from getting stuck, but then people will complain that you can throw grenades
through things that should be solid.
Or that bullet decals don’t appear on a surface when they should, or that enemies
appear on the radar from behind what should be solid cover and so on.
Every situation is different and requires the mapper to weigh up the pros and cons of
different solutions.
And you can never say for sure that they’ve all been fixed.
Especially since Will Oakley has found this one, which is still a problem.
It looks as though Valve has tried to patch this one up already but has left a thin gap
between the prop and the wall.
And yes, a bomb can get stuck down there.
Please fix.
Maybe there are others as well but I haven’t heard of them.
Speaking of clipping, there’s a strange diagonal one just here that stops you from
jumping.
Instead, your head hits it and you bounce back a bit.
I don’t know why this is here, it’s been around for a while and I guess was Valve experimenting
with something.
It would be less distracting just to replace it with a traditional vertical brush.
More inexcusable are bugs like THIS, where there’s a gap between the ground and the
wall.
This typically happens with displacements, which act as mouldable terrain in Source to
make hills and bumps out of.
You can shift these in any direction, so my guess is that Valve accidentally shifted these
edge points to the side and it left a gap.
It would be really easy to fix these things.
A 5-second job.
I found these points in a number of spots in the map.
And granted, most aren’t easy to spot in play because as a player you can’t get close
enough to the wall to see them.
But they are there!
In most places the opposite is the case, where the ground extends a distance into the wall.
I wonder if this was deliberate to create an ambient-occlusion style shadow around the
edges.
Source’s lighting isn’t always precise enough to simulate this effect on its own,
but by exploiting the approximate lighting that displacements have, you can achieve something
similar.
Fun fact: back in 2012 it was possible to force ambient occlusion by enabling it in
Nvidia’s control panel, which gave everything in Source a shadowy outline that may or may
not have been better than nothing at all.
Unfortunately, combined with smoke grenades… this ended up giving you wallhacks, so the
Source engine now forcefully disables it whenever you load the game up.
Jbf showed me an impressive pixel walk that you can do just here with minimal effort.
Simply crouch-jump along here and within a few attempts you should hook onto it.
Why does this exist?
Well, two different parts of the wall join at this point.
You can see the transition just here: it connects the lower wall texture with the upper ‘trim’
texture, just to make it look a bit prettier than the same texture all the way up.
And although there isn’t actually a ledge here, it seems there’s a bug in the Source
engine which allows for the join to act as one.
Maybe it’s because there’s a displacement also sticking out to the edge of the wall
at this point, which would explain why it’s not possible to do from this other bit over
here, where the displacement stops a lot sooner.
Honestly, more research needs to be done on this GAME BREAKING BUG.
I did a video a while back on a killer-wall bug where a prop intersects with a wall, and
it seems like it’s still possible in the area between the crate and the car in bombsite
B of Dust2.
I could repeat it myself by standing on the car then by slowly edging towards the crate
until I began dropping.
At that point, if I tried running back onto the car again, I’d hover in the air, eventually
plummeting to my doom.
Thanks to Wallen for the information about this!
InSovietCS deserves a mention as he has informed me of several Dust2 glitches.
His bombstuck spots have been patched, but he also showed me a horrible stuck spot on
bombsite B. Run along the side of this crate and the top crate will stop you completely,
jamming you in the corner until you change direction to get free again.
Unsurprisingly, if you crouch and go under then you can’t stand up until away from
it again.
This is nitpicky, but is at one of the most important parts of the most popular map ever
and being unintentionally blocked here could change the result of a round in some way.
For optimisation, the backs of things aren’t drawn to improve framerate.
The following bug only occurs when bumpy displacement walls don’t have a visible back to them,
allowing grenades and flashes to pass through them from that direction.
This is most obvious along the walls outside of B tunnels here.
Grenades quite visibly fly straight through the walls and any flashes dropped down the
back will get anybody on the other side.
But it also applies to this bit of wall here on bombsite A, as pointed out by Tarik.
The solution here would be to either add a displacement to the back, or an invisible
brush of some kind.
So, even with a map as finely polished as Dust2, there are still problems with it.
There is still pop-up from overly aggressive optimisation.
Fade-in from overly aggressive optimisation and good framerates from overly aggressive
optimisation.
I’m sure that the updated version will get rid of all these things.
We’ll just have to wait and see.
Oh and also the sun isn’t properly lined up.