You only realise how polished CS:GO’s maps are when you play another game and immediately
get stuck on a sticky-out bit of scenery. Indeed, the standards in CS:GO are HIGH. No
ledge is left unclipped. No prop, an obstacle. These maps are lubed to the extreme. Pick
a direction and run and you’ll only get stopped once you reach a very obvious corner.
Even stairs are a blissfully smooth experience, with your aim gracefully gliding up every
stair as though it’s a gradual slope. Everything has been smoothed out for your gaming pleasure.
But Counter Strike hasn’t always been so smooth.
1.6, for example, doesn’t have this. Every step will jolt your vision. It’s SICKENING!
Granted, there seems to be some sort of built-in smoothing to 1.6’s movement, but go up one
step at a time and the jolt is real. And if you run down them your person falls off, just
like real life! Perhaps unsurprisingly it’s maps like Aztec that perform the best, which
contain smooth slopes! Though I suspect that this design decision was originally chosen
to keep your framerate high, rather than your aim true.
Counter Strike Source’s movement engine is a bit smoother. Rush up the stairs and
it smooths out your movement. Support for running down stairs smoothly was added 3 months
after the game’s release in December of 2004 and then again a year later when they
realised they hadn’t fixed it the first time. Move slowly, however, and the jolt is
real. Fortunately, though, this could be fixed if
the mappers could be bothered to add clips to their maps. These are invisible, solid
blocks that have LOADS of different uses- here you can see I’ve turned an option on
that lets you view these things as solid red blocks. They can stop the bomb from getting
stuck somewhere, or in the case of stairs, serve as an invisible slope to smooth out
player movement. But this wasn’t standard for Source. Less popular maps, like Italy
and Dust1, don’t have any clipping at all and even Dust2 and Inferno only have it on
some places, normally the most popular spots. Since the last map to be added to the game-
Militia- doesn’t have any, it seems like these clips were added later on and only in
places where the devs felt it affected gameplay. But how much later?
Judging by the updates, it looks like Team Fortress 2 was the first game where Valve
really cared about using clips to finely polish maps, so at first only expected these clips
to be added to CS:S in perhaps 2010, with the release of the Orange Box update for the
game. But I was wrong. I’m SORRY! Sorry sorry sorry. I used a non-steam
version of Counter Strike Source to see what it was like in 2007. And it included clipping!
This pretty much confirms that clipping was never a standard feature for Valve to include
in Source, and was only added to the most popular maps in the most important spots.
Interestingly, the stairs leading up to B on Inferno are smoothed in the 2007 release
but not in today’s version, so maybe they lost the most recent version and had to use
an earlier one when remaking it for the Orange Box update. Maybe.
And now onto our FAVOURITE game, CS:GO. And they clearly ported Inferno across cos the
earliest version of the map has similar clipping to the latest CS:S version… though they
somehow lost the clips around B in the process. But it’s a lot better than the earliest
version of Dust2 which has NO clips on stairs at all! Every trip up or down them vibrates
your screen like a mother. But you know why this is, don’t you. Unlike Inferno, which
only had a bit of an update, they Dust2 got a far more rigorous make-over visually and
I guess they forgot or just didn’t care about adding back the clipping. Not until
July of 2013, three quarters of a year after the game first came out.
Admittedly, these stairs are okay. But many suffer from another problem that still persists
to this day! Valve tends to only clip them from the first
step onwards, meaning that as you approach a staircase there will be a little ‘bump’
before it becomes smooth. Why they do this is a mystery to me. It could be to stop you
from ‘bumping’ upwards if you’re simply trying to pass by the stairs without intending
to go up them. But at the end of the day… it’s just sloppy design. They could always
push the stairs one back if that’s a concern and it would solve the issue.
Every official Valve map follows different rules. The Hostage maps are, perhaps unsurprisingly,
the poorest supported ones. Most stairs on Office aren’t clipped at all. On Italy,
they miss the first step- and in the new hostage place they forgot them completely. Assault
is very well done, though they forgot about the stairwell around the back. It’s so inconsistent!
And Militia doesn’t have any stair clipping at all.
Moving to the defuse maps, Overpass, Mirage and Cache are perfect! Very good job, Valve.
Dust2 and Train are also great, though there’s this weird sticking-out bit on the stairs
near T-spawn that will annoy you from now on. Inferno is a mixed bag, some okay but
many missing the first stair. Cbble’s A site is perfect, but everywhere else skips
the first step. And the spiral staircase isn’t done at all.
But are Valve learning? If their newest map- Nuke- is anything to go by then… no. Nuke
does some okay but many others miss the first step.
Who knows what they’ll do for Infernew? Maybe by then they’ll have stair clipping
standardised, sussed and sorted. But probably not.
And even if they did, spiral staircases would probably still defeat them. Indeed, even on
the highly polished and over-lubed Dust2 map you’ll find the spiral staircase in B tunnels
isn’t clipped properly. It does some bits of it, but misses the bottom, top and some
of the steps in the middle as well. There’s a reason that these spiral stairs might not
be clipped. You see, modelling a clip brush to a spiral stair makes the surface unflat,
and the technology just isn’t there yet. The moment you reload the map it’ll change
to something broken and different-looking. So what’s the solution?
Well, don’t make spiral staircases. BUT IF YOU DO, follow a guide like this one by
X6herbius, who found a way of doing it using 2 separate clips per stair! It’s still not
perfect, if I make the clip visible then you can see that it’s still got little lumps
and bumps in it. But it’s still a lot better than not having any at all. Interestingly
enough, SOME of the spiral stairs on Dust2 are clipped in this way as well, though strangely
not all of them. Oh, Valve, and you were so close to impressing me!
So there’s some stuff about CS:GO that you probably didn’t even know.
Or care about.