This is a Wingman map that’s 800 MB in size. This makes it one of the most detailed Source
maps ever created. I’ll be showing its beauty in lovely, smooth flybys throughout this video,
as I talk about how we reached this point, and what’s next for mappers of CS:GO.
This map is called Prime, and it will be released shortly. It’s being developed by Will,
AKA known as ‘Celery’ who previously worked on Hive, and it’s also being worked on by RZL,
who’s made all sorts of maps you know already including Climb,
Basalt and Engage. There’s lots of beautiful custom sound effects, too,
designed by MF Kitten. And the map’s logo was designed by his friend, Jonmcbane.
I’ll be honest- Prime caught my eye because of Will’s obsession with shiny surfaces.
They’ve been sending me beautiful shiny things for months. They know the way to my heart.
And if you seek, you shall find. There ARE
many shiny surfaces on this level! Some are big and flat, and show the effect clearly. Others,
you’ll have to search for… like the reflections on this rebar, just here.
But, while this map DOES feature a lot of subtly shiny surfaces,
it’s the sheer detail of the map that’s done it for me. It doesn’t look like a normal Source map;
it looks far grittier, dirtier and more DETAILED than you’d expect from Counter-Strike.
EVERY surface, of even the most basic of corridors,
is plastered in tons of custom-built details. If I saw this scene,
I wouldn’t immediately think it was from the Source engine. I’d say it was idtech 6,
or an Unreal 4 port of a UT2004 level. But it’s not. It IS Source. The same engine that
has driven games going back as far as Half Life 2 and Counter-Strike Source, way back in 2004.
Here’s a map from that era, called Prodigy. This was a good-looking map, back then!
Conveniently, it’s in almost the same style as Prime is, so I can leap between the two to
show you just how far mappers have pushed the Source engine over the last 18 years.
But one thing about this map ISN’T what you’d expect from a modern CS:GO level.
Do you see it? No, you don’t. Because it isn’t here. Nor is it here… nor here…
…there it is! They’ve set the shadow
distance to a very, very small value, meaning that this level doesn’t use dynamic shadows-
which is incredibly unusual for a CS:GO map. Normally, mappers are all over those sharp,
dynamic shadows, using them to mask the underlying, low-resolution lighting that
CS:GO actually uses to light its level. If I disable these dynamic shadows on Dust2,
you can see HOW low-res the underlying shadowmap is. This is ultimately the layer that calculates
how the world is lit, but it’s the realtime shadows that are normally overlaid over the
top of it that mask how BAD this layer looks. But Will has intentionally opted to hide the
realtime shadows, taking it upon themselves to bring the underlying, pre-calculated lighting up
to scratch instead. You’ll still see shadows on your hand model, though. And when you do, it’ll
be super high res cos that’s like, the entire maps’ worth of shadows you’ve got right there!
So… why did they go down this route? Well, these pixel-sharp realtime shadows in CS:GO are all well
and good in many situations, but they aren’t how shadows should look when the weather is overcast.
And Will decided that the older techniques could achieve their creative vision for the map
better instead. On surfaces, the lightmap quality was increased beyond what’s normal
for a CS:GO map to make it look less blobby. And as models are shaded per-edge, they upped
the polygon count on these things to increase the perceived quality of the lighting on them.
In other words, this map is lit in a way I haven’t seen before from a CS:GO map.
Another way Will improved upon Source’s lighting was to bake a lot of the details in using
third party programs first. So that’s probably why this map looks less like a Source map,
and more like a high-quality map that’s forced into Source, kicking and screaming.
And all this has been made possible, thanks to MODELS!
Models have ALWAYS been a thing in Source, right back to its release in 2004 with Half Life 2 and
Counter-Strike Source. It’s what made maps for Source look better than ones from 1.6.
This here, is a model. So is this. And so is this. In older maps, models were things used
to add extra detail to key places. But in newer maps like Prime, pretty much EVERYTHING’s a model.
Here is Prodigy, if all props are disabled. Now here is Prime, if all props are disabled!
That’s a lot of props. Traditionally, bumpy looking walls have been
made out of displacements. Here’s another early Source map, which uses displacements to create a
rocky-looking wall. These are far better than the flat-looking walls of 1.6, as displacements are
like a sheet of triangles that you can raise and lower, and generally bend to your will
until you’ve bent your wall. But Prime goes one step beyond even this, by using models instead,
which provides even greater flexibility to shape and to texture them exactly as intended!
Will showed me the powerful tools they used to make them and to bend them to their Will.
It takes a while to set something like this up, once it is, it’s very easy to make adjustments to
the whole thing without having to painstakingly remake and to reposition it all in Source.
And here it is again, once turned into a model and placed in CS:GO’s own map editor. Normally,
everything at this stage is still waiting to be given lighting, once the map starts rendering and
Source can apply its own lighting calculations to the objects. But as you can see here,
there are already a number of props that have some lighting information baked into them, and this was
performed in superior, third-party programs. It’s this extra lighting, shading pass and
pre-calculated bump maps which help to overcome Source’s own lighting limits and it results in
models in this map looking more detailed, bumpier and slipperier than they have any right to.
In this map, about 90% are Will’s own creations, using programs like Blender and
Substance Designer. 5% are CS:GO’s stock assets, and the final 5% are licensed assets from sites.
Will showed me Speedtree, which is the program they used to get the trees looking great.
This is a tool that’s been used in countless games and movies already-
and if it wasn’t for my life-long hatred of trees,
I’d be tempted to boot it up and to create some unholy monster of a tree out of it as well!
And this is Terragen, which was used construct an awesome multi-layer skybox for de_prime.
As you can see, you enter some variables, and then a convincing-looking sky morphs into existence
right in front of you. Will is particularly proud of this map’s skybox- and the more you look at it,
the more you see! I didn’t even notice this distant city until I visited the skybox itself!
Will even took the time to construct a detailed backstory to this map.
It ties in with Will’s other projects, several yet to be released. But there are also links to Hive,
which is already out, and already featured in the game. Will has tried to keep the environmental
storytelling subtle enough that doesn’t distract from the gameplay, while still rewarding players
who take the time to investigate it, and to appreciate the world they’re building.
Modern levels have so much hidden thought and effort behind them- they’re no longer something
constructed by somebody in the Hammer editor over the course of a weekend. Maps like Prime take
up a sizeable chunk of the mapper’s life. This wingman map has taken Will over a year to make,
working pretty much full time on it when they aren’t busy with university and contract work.
During this time, Will has built this map up, then scrapped bits again, then rebuilt them again until
it’s up to a standard that Will is happy with. But it is still just the Source engine.
And as the mapping and modelling standards within the scene increase, it is the engine
that is holding mappers back, and restricting how great their creations can look. And run.
Transparent textures have several problems. The edges of stuff- especially on lower resolution
textures- can look blobby. And the Source engine is so old and outdated, the technology
isn’t even there to anti-alias the edges of transparent stuff, so even at maximum settings,
plants in CS:GO can look distractingly pixelated. Especially when gaming at lower resolutions,
which is how most people play the game. But Will has found a solution. ‘Alpha to coverage’
smooths the look of everything out- even when no anti-aliasing is being used! -Which again, is how
most people play the game. The downside is, if you get close enough to stuff like this grass here,
you’ll make out the weird, transparent, dithered look that this effect comes with. It’s a clever
technique, but it still comes with compromises. And the shaders on the leaves themselves are also
limited! Newer game engines support something known as PBR, (Which is Physically Based
Rendering) which enables the surfaces to look far more convincing, with elements of translucency and
reflectivity that go far beyond the basic shaders that CS:GO currently supports. These leaves,
for instance, could have a beautiful waxy sheen to them. A lot of this detail is crushed out
in the process of porting to Source, while other elements must ramped right up, in order to balance
the look again. Porting stuff between programs is a difficult thing to get looking just right.
Off the top of my head, I THOUGHT there was motion in existing maps.
Clouds tend to move… albeit very slowly. Nuke has this flowing river, but it’s well
out of the way of the play area. Inferno has these smoke stacks,
high above your head. And Dust2’s palm trees move.
A bit.
And yes, stuff moving is likely very subdued in the name of being competitive. But then you look
at Prime and it’s like… it’s alive! Everything seems to move or change in some way. Leaves
blow in the wind, water pours down through cracks, dust floats about when caught in the light beams.
But Will suspects that all these details will cause problems with smoke grenades,
especially in the way they interact with the numerous fog and dust particles that they
have used around this map. Optimisation and bug-fixing is now Will’s focus with this map,
but a lot of the time they’re battling with issues beyond their control, and they fear they’ll have
to sacrifice many elements of their artistic vision in the name of minimising visual bugs.
A lot of people are memeing about the Source 2 engine coming out for CS:GO’s 10th anniversary.
But that would actually be great for mappers like Will! They say that they wouldn’t need to
do so much lighting and shading in third party programs if CS:GO was on the Source 2 engine;
this newer engine is a lot more capable than what CS:GO has right now- it can light the
maps far more convincingly, and with far less noticeable seams between separate objects.
It’s really what is needed in this day and age, when maps comprise of so many individual parts.
And it won’t just to make maps look better, but it will save mappers a hellolalalot of time,
which they’re currently spending trying to make their maps NOT
look ugly. Valve’s engine is really being pushed to the limit here.
I bet Will encountered all sorts of leaks! Indeed, just trying to make this map look
realistic has been a huge ordeal! Will thinks that many CS:GO maps go down the more colourful,
clean and cartoony approach BECAUSE of Source’s limitations. Will told me how much effort and
pain they endured to introduce this much grunge to a Source-based map. This art style simply isn’t
catered to in the engine, and they don’t think they’ll bother with it again. Source is just
too restricting for this sort of graphical style. So de_prime is a fascinating look at what can be
achieved with the Source engine, IF you go against everything it’s designed for. Will says they were
influenced by games like Titanfall, Call of Duty and Wolfenstein, but wanted to marry that art
style with the CS:GO way of doing things. Their friend, Edude, is also in the process of creating
a similarly themed map, so it will be interesting to compare the two come release this month.
Upon release, De_prime will be immediately playable on the Mapcore Faceit Wingman hubs,
so keep an eye out for that! Will had all sorts of help
from experts in the scene, like from RZL, and Quoting. And says that their work on this map
has made them more greatly respect the leaders in the scene; people who have truly mastered
the art of making CS:GO maps, like Catfood, FMPONE, jd40, jakuza, Rick, Oskmos, Lizard,
Thewhaleman, Horse Strangler and Yanzl- who Will deems the current king of the ‘CS:GO’ art style!
Thank you to Will for taking the time to talk to me about their creation.
Check out their artstation profile in the link of this video’s description.