In a game as competitive as CS:GO, exploits are kind of a big thing.
Overpass has been notorious for sporting certain boost spots which may not have been intended,
and that some may even consider to be overpowered! The most infamous example was the Olofboost,
which was used to great effect by Fnatic back in 2014 to snatch victory from the jaws of
defeat against LDLC during the quarterfinal stage… before forfeiting the match and handing
the win back to LDLC. Exploits don’t pay! (In official tournaments).
That boost was patched up, but since then numerous others have been found- likely through
trial and error. But what if there was a way of finding these things scientifically, using
maths and stuff? The people over at ExploitMafia, known as
Vexadros, Classic & SmurfDestroyer (Who also showed me the spectator exploit a few years
ago), have done just that… as well as discovering reliable methods to achieve them.
They showed me pixelsurfs. These occur where the top of one surface meets the bottom of
another, like a texture or clip brush. You can tell because the textures of both will
usually look different, and by turning on wireframe mode, if there’s a line between
them then it’s pretty likely that they’re surfable… provided you can get to the right
height before jumping! There doesn’t need to be anything sticking out- and they don’t
even need to be visible textures! Once you’ve jumped and have initiated the surf, you’ll
slide along relative to the direction you’re looking. To remain surfing, you must keep
holding the direction buttons pointing towards the wall you’re surfing along, or you’ll
just drop straight down again. Pixelsurfing will allow you to gain a view
of the level that you otherwise wouldn’t. You’ll be able to see over walls. It can
suspend you in positions that other players might not bother checking. Plus, while some
of these spots require boosts to get you there, once you start surfing you can do it alone.
And if that’s not enough to interest you… you can shoot while pixel-surfing. It thinks
you’re mid-way through a jump, so your accuracy with most weapons will be terrible. But SMGs
work reasonably well at close ranges, and the scout fires with decent accuracy! Valve
please fix. The values you need to know are these:
The height of your view is 64.09 units. A crouch jump raises you by 66 units.
And your hitbox is 72.04 units tall. And cl_showpos 1 will show your location in
the level. The easiest way to find a pixel-surf is to
start with a slope- since getting the right height is the hardest part. Next, somewhere
along that slope you’ve got to find a connection between two parts of the same wall. And now
comes the science! You find the height of the connection of the
wall by lining yourself up exactly next to it. Then you add your height to that number,
then subtract by a crouch-jump. In short, with all the maths done, for this type of
pixel-surf you need to be 1.91 units below the height of the wireframe that you want
to pixel-surf along, and then you simply need to run and crouch-jump at it.
And in case you were wondering, when I show an example that’s at a height of 256 units,
that’s 256 units above the centre of the Source-engine’s mappable area, and not 256
units above the floor below them. Any crouch-jump pixel surfs you can do on your own will only
ever be about 66 units above the floor below them… otherwise you wouldn’t be able to
do them. Even once I’ve initiated a pixel surf, I’m
not out of trouble. It will fail the moment I run off the edge of the wall connection
I’m surfing along, or if I stop holding the keys that keep me running towards the
wall. But with a bit of practice, I can turn myself around, then with a scout can fire
off some pretty decent shots. It’s often easier to be facing roughly the right direction
BEFORE the jump. So bear that in mind. Not all pixel-surfs are created equally. Some-
like this one- are easy to pull off. Just get to the right height and jump! But others
can be made to work by doing 2 more things. Firstly, you need to get as close to the wall
as you can. Simply running up to it isn’t enough- you’ll still be .03 of a unit away.
Jump at it while pressing A or D and you can get that .03 down to a nice round 0. And then
once you’ve found the perfect height, you need to look directly parallel to the wall,
so if you run forwards you don’t slide left or right at all.
This will make some of the pixel surfs a lot easier to initiate.
Sadly, maps are getting increasingly resilient to this exploit! Old maps used to have their
walls made of walls. It’s not of much use any more, but I loaded up the old Dust2 and
immediately found one that would let me slide around the corner of short A. Armed with a
scout, this would be dangerous indeed! This was made possible because the wall is made
of wall. But newer maps- especially the Valve remakes
and Cache- make everything out of displacements. Effectively making everything out of bumpy
ground… but without the bumps. I don’t think this was done deliberately to stop pixel-surfing-
probably more to do with optimisation. But from my testing, this modern approach makes
it a lot harder to achieve the pixel-surf in the first place, and then to remain surfing
even if you do manage to pull it off. But these surfs DO still exist, and I’ll
leave it to Exploitmafia to find and to showcase these. Apart from a few which I’ll demonstrate
now! While I’ve only covered ones you can do
on your own, the more exciting ones come from boostable spots, which may allow for you to
see over walls that aren’t often seen over. Over on Exploitmafia’s youtube channel they
have an example of one that requires a friend to help pull off. Your friend needs to be
stood 73.95 units below the height of the connection between wall and clip brush. It
has to be 73.95, since when stood on top of his 72.04 unit-tall hitbox, it’ll bring
you up to the magical 1.91 unit-mark we’ve mentioned previously.
This spot is ideal since the sloped sandbag will enable your friend to find the exact
height needed to pull this kind of boost off. And there it is. Yet another quirk in the
Source engine that Exploitmafia have bothered to research and to master. And I’ve only
covered the crouch-jump variety. There are all sorts of others that they’ve also covered
over on their channel, like the standard jump type, and the run-boost type which they even
used to replicate that recent boost discovered on Overpass.
They make it look easy, but it took them several hours to suss it out! The difficulty came
with closing that .03 unit gap from the wall in the short period of time they had between
hitting the wall, and falling to the pixel-surf height. Continuously strafing left yielded
the best results… though even that didn’t guarantee success.
It’s easy to take for granted stunts such as these, but a lot of hard work and experimentation
goes into this, even when they understand the theory behind it.
Check out a video of Vexadros’s here- as he was the one who found most of these jumps-
and he helped find some bugs with my de_newke a few years ago. And see more examples of
pixel surfs over on Exploitmafia’s channel here- as well as a more in-depth tutorial
on how to get it working. Valve, pls fix.