You know those super popular, klik-baity videos that compare the size of game worlds? They
start with something small like Counter-Strike’s Dangerzone map, then get larger and larger,
going through the usual assortment of battle royale, Elder Scrolls and Grand Theft Auto
game worlds. They roar past Arma’s several-100 km² environments, and Daggerfall’s is usually
mentioned somewhere as well even though nobody would want to explore it.
I think Fuel deserves the prize, being 120 Km ACROSS and actually being a place you might
want to explore. But most of these comparison videos go too
far by including entirely procedurally generated environments like Minecraft’s- which could
effectively go on forever- and they claim it’s larger than planet Earth, or perhaps
they feature something really ridiculous like No Man’s Sky or Space Engine where clearly
the same rules no longer apply. And if they don’t cover these, someone in the comments
section will! But how big is Minecraft’s world? And how
is this relevant to Counter-Strike in the slightest?!?!
Well, Minecraft’s world SORT of has a size. There are whispers of the FART LANDS, where
conventional laws of physics break down and the world ends up doing funky stuff like mountains
full of person-shaped holes that you just want to fit snugly in to.
Unfortunately, I think the game’s increasingly advanced algorithms have ruined this, because
all I could find were the STRIPE LANDS! And it only requires 16,777 Km of travel to reach
them. With a bit of trial and error, I found the
cut-off point. Typing the console command ‘toiletpaper 0, 90, 16,777,216’ will get
you right to the edge of Minecraft’s world as we know it! At this point, the world stops
being solid and begins missing every block, resulting in a stripey, unusable world. Here,
nothing is solid, and I can only float up and down in the air where I spawned to. But
that’s why they’re called floating point numbers I suppose.
Because 16,777,216 just happens to be 2^24. It also happens to be exactly how many colours
a standard 8 bit monitor can display. Isn’t life full of incredible coincidences. It’s
almost like there’s got to be more to it than that.
But I won’t talk about why in this video. Because you won’t understand it. And, more
importantly, because I don’t. Just know that floating point numbers have more accuracy
closer to 0, so as you go further away from that point in games like Minecraft -and yes,
Counter-Strike- the errors get greater, and everything, more janky. And exciting.
There’s a guy currently trying to reach the Far Lands in Minecraft, in a series called
‘Far Lands or Bust’. His experience is already becoming super janky and rubberbandy
and he’s only 1/3 of the way there! …And he’s been doing it for 10 years so far.
Best of luck to him. Luckily, it won’t take me so long to achieve
this in CS:GO. Because it seems like a unit in CS:GO is about 1 inch instead of 1 metre,
and because I can speed up time to travel there. But I can’t just teleport there!
If I try to teleport to a super large number and it’ll just put me on the edge of the
editable space for Source games, which is only 16,000 units away from the central point,
instead of 16 million. So it looks like I’ll have to do it the hard way.
I set off in noclip, to explore the endless world of floating point jank.
Soon, everything went black and I had to enable fullbright, which is why everything looks
so unlit and flat. Not a lot I can do about that, sadly.
And I didn’t have to get far before I started running into jank. Just 24,000 units away
from the centre point- which is barely beyond the far reaches of the biggest of levels-
the white dots on my P2000 started flickering, battling to be seen over the black texture
behind them. This is known as Z fighting, where the game thinks they’re both the same
distance away, and struggles to know which to display in front of the other. And if you
look very closely, the gun’s shape is very quietly bubbling around where it meets the
player’s hands. Already, the floating point precision is breaking down! But this is just
the start. At twice this distance -50,000 units- it looks
about the same, but more obvious. Which pretty much sums up a large chunk of this adventure.
At 100,000, the effect became obvious enough that I whipped out my AWP and you can see
it really popping about where the elements of the weapon connect to one another.
At 500,000 units, it breaks! I can now see bits of my player’s arm through his sleeve,
and there’s always at least a bit of the AWP model that’s gone transparent and broken.
It looks kind of cool on the P2000, like layers of the weapon are being stripped away. And
the knife, for some reason, holds up well and remains almost perfect despite the power
of MATHS. Now, 2.5 million! You can make out ‘streaks’
across the model as it’s moving, as though everything passes through a number barrier
where the error gets greater. The models are no longer represented as points, but more
as a visible grid that the points dart between. And at 5 million, this effect gets even more
apparent. Even the knife, which had been behaving so well up to this point, is starting to look
a little silly now. As I approached 16.7 million units, I noticed
occasional bright flashes on the screen that I can’t explain. Perhaps they’re singular
polygons that bug out and become infinitely large. Maybe they’re not. Maybe this is
what the 4th dimension looks like! Whatever these were, they were infrequent.
Although I tried to keep myself level and from going too far diagonally, it turns out
that my exact distance from the central point doesn’t matter- the only thing that does
is my raw X or Y (Or Z! But only a psychopath would go vertically up) values hitting that
16.7 million figure. So just before I pass over the event horizon, here’s one last
look at my janky weapons. And here’s a warning about epileptic seizures,
because things are about to get very, very uncomfortable for anybody watching this. Don’t
try this at home. Seriously, it’s painful. Suddenly, the white flashes I had previously
briefly encountered became my reality, and the screen quickly flashed between white and
grey. It really wasn’t nice, but I wanted to see if there was another stage to it. Would
I finally break out of this region again, or was this my existence forever more?
Incredibly, at 22 million units, it stopped and I inspected my weapons again, now jankier
than ever! So if you ever complain that CS:GO is broken, just know that a game hosted out
here would be even more so. I’d kind of like to see it, if I’m honest.
And then I pushed on further still. I don’t know how far I got -maybe 33 million units-
and then the game suddenly crashed, and without warning.
So there you have it: beyond the limits of CS:GO is jank, more jank, quite a lot of flashing,
even more jank… and then crash.
Valve pls fix