Recently I covered a map from Counter-Strike: Source, called Suburbs, which I had ported
across to CS:GO. Well, the map’s story doesn’t end there!
Venomfang contacted me again. He isn’t the one who made the map. The credit for that
goes to [DNV]Cross. But Venomfang IS the man whose house it used to be. And since then
he has taken up mapping and game-design, and has remade the map in Pavlov. Which is pretty
much Counter-Strike, but in VR.
‘Hey’
‘Oh well I was gonna show Philip the new features in the map’
‘OOHH okay’
‘He’s also new to Pavlov -I think- so he doesn’t really know how some of the guns
work.’
‘Oh fair enough’ Now I’m not going to fill this video up
with clips of me struggling with the controls, so from now on it’ll be edited clips of
the house-tour, with a few amusing things that occurred along the way. And a decent
taste of the super friendly and helpful community that exists in the game.
‘Oh my God’
After realising how much of a noob I was, weapons were put down and everybody I met
on the server was happy to help me with the basics. I was made to feel very at home in…
this home.
‘You remind me of someone- your voice, you remind me of someone that I watch on Youtube’.
‘I got a 1080- oh, me too.’
‘Oh… I’m playing on a 3070’ In my last video about this map, I talked
about how my friends and I would load this map up and simply mess around, and how we
don’t do things like that any more. Well, with Pavlov, it was as though I had been transported
back in time, with everybody displaying the same enthusiasm and wonder that we used to
have with Counter-Strike back then. I’m… not saying that this is going to become a
channel dedicated to VR gaming. But it was nice to have a taster of this sort of community
again.
One thing that hadn’t changed about this map is the emphasis on destruction. Venomfang
wants to feature as many breakable items in this map as possible. Right now there are
about 700 destructible assets, though a lot of these are individual slats on windows and
stuff like that.
He briefly talked me through the netcode. It requires a lot of data to keep this sort
of destruction in sync over the internet, so while some items are kept the same between
players, other things are only client-side. So if you shoot a ball about on the snooker
table, nobody else will see it move because this kind of movement requires a LOT of updates
and it just isn’t important enough to transport over the internet for the sake of a Pavlov
match.
‘Is your name ‘ombran?’ …’Ombran?’
‘No! I’m Venomfang.’
So, let’s get on with the house tour!
‘Alright! Come, Philip.’
‘Hold on: Venom…’
‘So, this is my bedroom. Where I used- yes, my cat was on this bed right here. The same
bedsheets. And I put- yup, this is my cat, Cody.’
‘Uhh, what’s your profile picture? It’s Venom?’
‘Yup, it’s Venom’
‘I used to do a lot of archery, so like, my recurve bow that I used to keep on my closet
door just like that.’
And this was my bathroom. I spent a lot of time here.
The upstairs closet.
Aha! Philip’s in the closet! Everyone, Philip’s in the closet!
You walked- walked right into that one!
This was the upstairs TV room. Sort of a, uh, spare room.
‘YOU SUCK!!!’
Don’t worry- soon we left for a private server where a battle wasn’t raging outside.
But I was kind of enjoying the spontaneous nature of doing a house tour on a public server.
‘This was my sister’s room, and her bathroom’
‘I… don’t know. Hello! High-five.’
‘I sent you a friend request.’
‘Yes, yes, I heard you. Thank you. Alright, so this is the upstairs… washer and drier’.
We were about to move into the master bedroom… BUT THEN MORE PEOPLE JOINED, and carnage ensued.
‘UH OH’
It’s pretty daunting being stuck in a PVP VR game that you don’t even know how to
get back to the menu of! Luckily the standard of play seemed pretty
low and I was even able to KILL other players. But this was when the tour went across to
an offline server.
‘Yeah, the arms are cool.’
Right! Alright. So, welcome. So, I’ll point out some of the new things that have been
updated from the previous version. The first thing you’ll notice is that all the marble
has a bevelled edge which makes it look more like a granite counter-top from a kitchen.
That’s good. All of the chairs are destructible…
A warning: this bit will go on for a while, just so that I can showcase the destructive
properties of this map for you.
‘You can shoot the table, the chairs… mirror’
I might even admit to having enjoyed it. Just a bit.
‘The plants… the windows, obviously. Uh, the flowers’
‘And all of this’
‘You want me to teach you how to reload that? Alright, so, first- okay…’
‘So, this is where me and my friends used to hang out. This was a pretty popular spot.
I had my PS3, and my gamecube. And this is where we’d play Mortal Kombat and Soul Calibur
and Marvel VS Capcom. We liked fighting games. One thing I do plan on as I continue to update
the map is I’ll make more and more things destructible so this is definitely something
I could do.’
‘The utility room, this is where the boiler for the house-‘
At this point I kicked off big time, telling him that this was NOT a boiler and asking
where he had hidden the real one. ‘I guess it’s not the highest quality
model. This room needs a lot of work, you know, I need to do all of the pipes and the
electrical what-nots, so… it’s temporary. Just temporary.’
‘This is the downstairs bathroom. You can shoot the toilets, too. I don’t think you
can knife the toilet.’
There’s some kind of built-in ageia physx destruction in the Unreal engine, and he promises
me he’ll be adding it to even more items in the world so I can break as many toilet-related
props as I please.
‘I’ll probably make these destructible at some point. Remember this walkthrough closet
from the other version, now with working doors.’
I decided not to enter that closet.
‘This was the downstairs cold room where we used to keep all our storage boxes and
all of the stuff we didn’t want to look at’
‘This room was furnished later, after that map was made. So in the real house, this was
here like that.’
‘This couch was an important couch for me. IUf you want to hear a little story about
this couch. Okay’
‘So there’s this girl that I met in highschool. And I really really liked her. So I invited
her over, and we were sitting on this couch and we got to smooching, so I had my first
kiss with that girl on this couch and it is forever an important memory. One of my happiest
memories 😊 Right here.
‘You can move your arms while you run.’
‘So this was just another closet. There was, in the actual house, there was a hole
which we had built into, like, right into- I didn’t include it in this map because
people wouldn’t know what it was. But there was a hole where my cat could go into and
then we kept the litter box in the closet so the smell didn’t permeate the house.
Some smart engineering. I didn’t put that in the map because… who wants a litter box.’
‘Another new feature in this area right here- yes, you can shoot the mirror. So, if
you look at the stairs, all of the lips of the stairs are now smooth instead of sharp
so they look more like carpet. You can see how it comes over the edge like…
Yeah, another fancy little detail. And then this mirror which we just added with all these
sort of Baroque details makes it, you know, nice…’
Something I noticed about this map was the increased fidelity on all of the paintings,
yet they retained the original designs. Had he kept the original textures? Or was this
all done from memory? He explained.
‘I added that because the original, real picture has gold accents in it. So I added
it, just like the real painting. Could it be this one? This painting was done by an
artist named the Vann Mills which were my friend’s parents so, we bought this painting
from them. They’re very talented.’
‘This is the master bedroom. Overlooking the ravine and the backyard which has the
pool.’
In the original the back yard had always been a bit… boring. So I asked him what it had
been like in reality.
‘The real backyard sort of looked like this, with the ravine and stream and houses across
the way, you can see them in the distance.’
When I was trying to get Suburbs working for CS:GO, I had to delete a lot of strange details,
like a healing trigger on a bed, a gman in a closet and birds outside. I needed ANSWERS.
‘There was an easter-egg where if you hit enough triggers in the map it would start
some music, and that bird was one of the last triggers. You had to shoot it and then the
music would turn on. That wasn’t my idea- that was Cross, he put that in. I think he
liked the idea of putting in secrets.’
‘I think Pavlov, for some reason, has an option to let you step up onto things.’
‘You want to see what happens to a chandelier when it gets hit by a grenade? It doesn’t
crash, you’ll get a moment of stutter but it looks really cool. You ready?’
And THIS is how to deafen people in VR.
‘This is the downstairs study. I’ve always imagined a fishtank. We never had one, but
I always imagined one going in that corner there. Maybe I’ll add one’
I remarked that this random spot in the corner is about the same size as an entire room in
my house. I’m a bit jealous at the scale of these American mansions.
‘I think, maybe when it was designed, there was going to be something here, but… oh
well.’
‘And you already know about the garage.’
‘And then you can close it as well. Another cool little feature is: you see how it gets
darker inside the closet? Pavlov doesn’t have realtime lighting of any kind, so I figured
I could use a decal which is at half opacity. I put it in the closet to give the illusion
of a shadow. I thought it was pretty smart.’
‘A nicely detailed little model.’
I asked him if the new owners were aware of their house’s legacy.
‘I don’t think they have any idea. Probably better keep it that way!’
‘This is the side alley. This is a really smart position, when you want to aim into
the house. This is actually how it was! It was designed for an epic shootout. You’re
exactly right.’
‘The real house also had this sort of down, I don’t know what you’d call this area.
There were some lawn chairs down here and some plants and stuff. It was pretty.’
How did he go about optimising the map’s framerate?
‘You’ve just got to keep the polycount low and make sure that as you look around,
you’re not seeing too many drops in the framerate. I haven’t gotten too many complains,
most people seem to think that it runs fine.’
‘This pool’s a little oversized compared to the real version but, uh, I might adjust
that in the future. Nope, no swimming. But you can hear the gurgling of the water.’
‘It’s not the highest quality model but I think most people will know what it is.’
And finally, we visited the neighbourhood. This was much bigger and more sprawling in
the original, but in this version, has more detail and a more focused start points for
both teams, CTs start out front and T’s start out the back, for balancing reasons
and so on.
‘We didn’t know where we wanted them to spawn so we just tried a bunch of different
things but in the new version, Terrorists start in the backyard and the other team spawns
right here.’
‘This is where all my patreons get their names on the wall. I added this so people
who spawn here get to see it without having to break into the house.’
He’s also made a night version of the map. And it’s dark! You have a handy little flashlight
which is just as well because it’s well eerie, walking about the halls and rooms of
the map in almost total darkness. It’s just as well I was on an empty server for this
because I don’t know how I’d have handled it if I found something lurking in a corner
somewhere. Venomfang has his own Pavlov server that’s
hosting his maps 24/7, you can connect to it like so and see the guy in person, and
shoot him and pat his head and everything. The server browser in this game isn’t the
easiest to use, but once you’ve found his Tactical-VR server, you can star it and it’ll
be at the top of the list from then on. As well as maintaining this, Venomfang is
gearing up to releasing his first steam game, called Super Versus, which is a third person
action game that he hopes will have a high skill ceiling and that will be suitable for
competitive play. You can check this out in the description as well.
So that’s it for Thornhill… for now. And I never thought I’d take a trip around it
in VR with Venomfang himself! Bye bye, Venomfang. Bye bye.