There’s a blackhole on Dust2, made famous by Fakejake and passed on to me by what felt
like the entire fanbase of Counter Strike.
I tested it and sure enough, it happened first time but then I had a real problem getting
it to work again.
But don’t worry- I’ve got it down to a fine art.
Indeed, if you’re stood in the correct position, facing the right angle, then it happens 100%
of the time.
But what causes this?
Come with me on my merry adventure of discovery (and disappointment)!
I started out with a copy of the original map and it still fell through the floor.
This is a relief in a way since it makes this kind of testing do-able.
I then switched to quick-compile which makes it all look rubbish, but saves me a hellolallalot
of time compared with a full render of this map.
Fortunately, it still fell through.
I removed EVERYTHING from the surrounding area.
Props, hint brushes, you name it.
I was left with just the floor and it still fell through.
So in theory, if this bit of floor is the same somewhere else then it’ll also happen.
I kind of expected this as well but it’s good to remove any other factors.
It happens to fall down a very specific spot where 2 separate floors connect.
They also happen to both be displacements, which are bumpy bits of ground made up of
a load of coordinates for each bit.
This doesn’t make this spot special- most of Dust2 is made up of these and there are
lots of bits in the map where they connect to each other like this.
But to my knowledge, the only other place discovered where this happens was by Coconavt
in this close-by location… which happens to be situated on the other side of the SAME
displacement as the other one!
This whole displacement seems faulty in some way!
By the way, shout-out to Coconavt for discovering this before it was cool.
Well done.
Next I tried changing it to see what we could get away with.
I made the displacement more detailed.
Shouldn’t change anything, but it obviously did because the pistol would no longer fall
through the floor.
So I tried turning it back to how it was originally, but it remained fixed.
Oh no!
I next tried sewing the displacements back together again to try and break it but it
annoyingly remained fixed.
In other words, this bug is very hard to create.
I don’t know how Valve managed it.
Defeated, I reverted to the earlier, buggy version and added a pretty shrubbery to the
background cos I thought it would look nice.
Don’t worry, it won’t interfere with this test.
I next stretched the displacement to double its original width and amazingly it remained
broken, but only in the gap between the same points it was originally broken between.
It’s not like you can do this glitch everywhere!
I tried some other stuff that I won’t bore you with, but I narrowed the issue down to
where the gun lands, rather than where the player is stood.
Once again, probably what you’d expect.
Which makes it a disappointment, doesn’t it.
But this is where things get more exciting!
If still boring in the grand scale of things that can happen in CS:GO.
Raise a point of the displacement and the bug still works.
But raise ones nearer to the affected area and it fixes the issue, even though the changes
shouldn’t have changed the problem area AT ALL.
I could have carried on doing these tests all day.
It’s what I live for.
But I’m certain at this point that the problem is how the displacement is made, and that
fixing it is simply a case of touching up the displacement.
Once again, probably what you were all expecting.
I did discover that most of the points of the displacement don’t follow the grid in
Hammer.
In other words, this displacement doesn’t match up with the very foundations that maps
in Source are built upon!
Typically this is a rookie mistake to make, normally done to displacements by resizing
it once you’ve already made it.
Rather than rounding each point to the nearest unit, doing this instead generates weird decimals,
which is what I suspect is causing this whole issue.
But rather than making this simple mistake, there is another possibility.
Rumour has it that this new Dust2 was made using some special version of Source 2, then
converted back to CS:GO in some way.
Perhaps this conversion process from models to displacements is responsible!
But it doesn’t matter.
What does is that something broke it and that it can be fixed in a matter of seconds.
I wish I had more to say about it than that but I don’t think it’s worth more of my
time.
It’s a freak bug.
An anomaly!
Here’s a fixed version that I made.
Oh and I also upgraded the shrubbery and added a little path running down the middle.
But it still shouldn’t affect the tests-