If you asked me if Left 4 Dead was worth playing, I’d say…
no!
Play Left 4 Dead 2 instead.
It’s got all of the old stuff, plus new content!
But it also received some other, more subtle improvements.
If you didn’t notice changes to the gore effects, congratulations!
You’re a normal, healthy human being.
I, however, did notice, and obsessed over them to a worrying extent.
To get you up to speed, in the original you could shoot their limbs off and there was
blood everywhere.
It’s all well and good, kind of what you’d hope for from a zombie game.
Apart from that they’d die the moment they lost a limb.
That’s not very zombie-like at all.
The second game let you do MORE.
There’s a great PDF about it by Valve artist, Alex Vlachos, who I assume spent many weeks
designing and experimenting with this gruesome new technology.
And got paid to do so.
The lucky guy.
I suggest you check it out if you want to know more, link is in the description.
I admit, I don’t understand the technology entirely.
But I do like looking at the pictures!
In short: Left 4 Dead 2 uses pose-space ellipsoids to make bits of bodies invisible!
This lets you shoot chunks out of the zombies, revealing blood, guts and bones, and often
going deep enough to go all the way through, but not necessarily killing them.
It’s gory stuff.
But it’s okay, because it’s done to zombies!
But what if they did the same to CS:GO?
What if I told you they do already?
Not to inflict horrible wounds, but instead to stop stuff from poking through walls.
If you’re holding an AWP and you hide behind a fence, the game used to make it poke through,
giving away your position from the other side.
Not very realistic, but you can understand how such a problem occurs.
I actually started doing a series where I studied where in maps this could be a problem.
It had so much potential, until Valve rudely introduced an update in September 2015.
One of the biggest of all time!
This was the one that updated the hitboxes, the animations, added defuse cords, adjusted
numerous weapons, and added some kind of technology that made stuff poking through walls go invisible.
At first there were problems.
It would sometimes be too aggressive, cutting half your face off if it’s too close to
a wall or whatever.
From certain positions you could even go completely invisible!
I remember casual games on Mirage where people would shove their face into the wall in mid
and completely disappear.
Never accuse the community of lacking imagination.
Sadly, all this exciting stuff has been patched out and the feature works as it’s supposed
to without much of a problem.
I will say: it’s still not perfect.
Get the wrong angle, have a knife out, or look at a fence the wrong way and you can
still sometimes pass through it a bit.
But I appreciate Valve’s efforts and understand the difficulty of creating a perfect system
that can handle every single combination of walls and fences that CS:GO throws at it.
I think we as players can accept the limitations and do our best to not to stand too close
to walls the rest of the time.
But there’s still one inexcusable problem that requires immediate fixing.
KNDxD is not the first person to mention it, but he is the latest to have gained Reddit’s
attention, showing a clip where a CT’s head sticks through the wooden planks just outside
of Palace, getting himself killed.
I made a level where I could repeatedly bash my head against ceilings of different heights.
But you know what?
When jumping normally, the clipping was very good!
It still passed through once in a while, but only very slightly- which isn’t too bad,
when you consider that these ceilings are just one unit thick.
A true worst-case scenario.
Most of the time, the player’s head would obey the laws of physics and bounce off the
ceiling as it should.
Valve has done a good job with this, though could perhaps be a little bit more aggressive,
or to make ceilings a bit thicker to ensure it doesn’t show through.
More obvious were the limitations of the pose-space ellipsoids… or orthotopes, or cuboids, don’t
know don’t care.
With an AWP out, it would almost always stick through the roof when the player was looking
upwards.
Seems the culling only occurs AROUND the player model, rather than above and below- perhaps
to stop the invisibility bug when this feature was first introduced.
And even when it DID hide the AWP, it would also eat into the player’s leg in a painful-looking
manner.
See, I talked about Left 4 Dead at the beginning of this video just because I wanted to, but
it’s turning out to be surprisingly relevant!
Strangely, this doesn’t happen in many places on real maps.
I wonder if you could go partially invisible in doorways by looking upwards.
I’ll let you guys experiment with that.
This invisibility culling won’t work particularly well in spots like the underpass on Inferno.
Your weapons will easily stick through the ceiling here, so keep your aim down when passing
through these spots.
I think bots will still see and shoot you regardless- another bug that Valve needs to
fix.
Oh, and I almost forgot to say - I got the head to stick through the ceiling every time
by crouch-jumping.
Yeah, this is a big problem, Valve!
Just press the crouch button and immediately jump and it will do it every time, from lots
of different ceiling heights!
It won’t do it if your crouch-timeout hasn’t reset, but leave it a second between jumps
and yes, it will do this every time.
I moved on over to Mirage and sure enough, crouch-jumping got my head to poke through
every time.
When you look back at the glitch footage, it’s all rather obvious: the CT was crouch-jumping
to get onto the top of the stone thing, which is why his head showed through.
It seems this problem is caused by animation blending, rather than from…
other stuff.
So actually, the invisibility thing I’ve been talking for the whole of this video isn’t
the solution.
But it was still fun to talk about, right?
Yes.
Yes it was.
Go play Left 4 Dead 2.
It’s fun.