This update makes grenades more reliably deal damage to players stood close to them.
Since the game came out, grenades have been a little bit unreliable. An explosion right
next to a player would occasionally NOT deal damage if there was even the tiniest bit of
wall or floor in the way. This would often happen in places like Short A, where players
could be shielded from a grenade’s blast by the stairs or this wall here.
It’s not actually an easy to thing to fix. If the game imagines the grenade as a point,
and the player as a point, all it requires is something solid between the two to make
it go ‘yup, you’re safe!!!’ …even if actually, they SHOULDN’T be. So maybe
it should check various parts of a player’s model to see if those parts are exposed, and
then to weigh the damage dealt out accordingly. Rainbow Six Siege received a similar kind
of update earlier this year, which might have been what inspired today’s change to how
grenades work in CS:GO. The grenade blast now appears to bend around
walls a bit. If a grenade explodes behind this wall here, you can see I still take damage,
whereas before, I would not. But maybe it isn’t the grenade bending around
walls, but instead because it’s treating me as a large blobby mass instead of a single
point. I still don’t know the specifics of how
it’s changed. There’s always the worry with something like this that it will go too
far in the opposite direction and people will start taking grenade damage through walls
or other things that should shield them. But from what testing I’ve done, it feels like
today’s change is a step in the right direction. The first of these tests I did was a grenade
going off when there was a wall between it and the player. When there was no wall, I’d
receive approximately 75 damage both before AND after the update. When the wall was THIS
high, strangely the damage before the update already dropped off a bit. Post-update, the
damage only starts to drop off when it reaches this height. At this height, pre-update it
suddenly dropped to 0. You can see from this example how silly this looks, since clearly
you should have sustained damage in this situation. And then returning to this, post-update, damage
continues to drop off smoothly as the wall gains more height. I agree with the patchnotes.
The damage applied has been made more reliable. I think the damage is now based on how much
of the player is exposed to the blast, and not just how far from it they are and whether
or not there’s something in the way. I also tested standing VS crouching. I imagined
that crouching, I’d take less damage since less of my body would be exposed, but I ended
up taking more, I guess because my head was closer to the blast? But then, with a slightly
higher wall, I took the same damage regardless of whether I was stood or crouched, when I
feel in this situation I should have taken less when crouched since I’m clearly better
sheltered from the blast.
The other test I did was to have a tall, thin wall to see how thin it could get before the
player started receiving damage. Before the update, any amount of wall would immediately
drop damage to 0, but since the update, it still deals damage if the blast can still
reach the edges of the player model. Now if I change the wall to this, you’d
expect it to only deal half the amount of damage, wouldn’t you. But the damage dealt
remained the same as when it was like this. So the system’s not perfect. But it’s
an improvement.
In other news, hostages don’t block the flash effect any more, so players can’t
treat them like a pair of sunglasses. I did this extremely scientific testing and discovered
that through the hostage, before this update the flash bang effect would wear off a lot
faster. Although I haven’t tested it, I think a hostage WOULD block a flash in real
life, so I’m not sure that this update was done for realism.
And picking weapons up has been made more reliable, thanks to birkir, who posted THIS
last week. It looks like the hitboxes of the grenades were made too large and it was interfering
with other objects close to them on the floor. I tried this out before the update. It doesn’t
look like it, but I’m spamming the use button here and yet the weapon only gets picked up
once my crosshair’s away from the molotovs. It seems this was only discovered because
of the game leak recently, which gave people access to stuff that had previously only been
seen by Valve employees. And it’s nice to see birkir getting a shout out from Valve,
since in another one of his comments he mentioned he had helped them fix other things and had
never gotten thanks. Some more of the buy menu animations have
been improved. If any are still dodgy-looking then let me know in the comments section.
And there have been a whole load of changes to the PURE SERVERS. This is something used
to prevent custom models and textures from being used by clients on those servers. Last
week a lot of people were being kicked because their stuff didn’t match up with the servers,
so I’m hoping this update will reduce how frequently this happens, and if it does, it
might even tell you why so you’ll know how to fix it.
I also hope that this fixes an exploit I’ve seen here and there for years. If you loaded
an older version of a map and then a newer one with changed models but the same filenames,
those props would go invisible. I noticed it a few times with my before/after map comparison
videos. I thought it was a glaring oversight on Valve’s part but I assume it’s exploits
like these that the recent updates have been trying to fix.
Having a taser but not a pistol no longer deletes the taser at the start of a new round.
And rechargeable zeuses now reload at the start of the next round. ‘WHAT?! Zeuses
aren’t rechargeable!’ I hear you thinking very loudly. It’s true- in normal games
you fire it and then chuck it on the floor like you don’t care about plastic pollution.
But a while back, in a weird gamemode we DID have rechargeable tasers. And still do in
another weird gamemode known as DANGER ZONE- it can be fired every 30 seconds. Now you
know that, you have more reason for picking that drop perk!
Also the drones now self-destruct more reliably without getting confused by other kinds of
damage. So that’s it for the update. The end.