2 days before Christmas I reached 500,000 subscribers.
Sorry about my voice, I think I’m going down with a cold.
Guess you can’t have it all.
But still: half a million people.
It’s hard to visualise that.
Sometimes I think it’s best not to as it can make releasing a new video a daunting
prospect!
Earlier this year I was at the Lanxess arena in Cologne with 15,000 people.
Imagine 33 of those, full of people and immediately notified whenever I release something.
Yeah that’s pretty scary.
Better stick to coloured squares.
500,000.
This makes me 1 hundredth the man that Pewdiepie is.
But still double 2kliksphilip!
Seriously though, as somebody who likes to make things I can’t imagine a greater honour.
So thank you to everybody for getting me this far.
I might have finished education, started work and had LOADDDDSSSS of girlfriends.
Like, so many.
But it took having a successful Youtube channel to get me to grow up.
My latest video about de_dust_PCG really brought it home for me, when I joined the servers
and met so many other people who had such a shared passion, for the game and where it
came from.
It was lovely to be able to talk to you guys.
And then to shoot you all in the face.
And then to see this video posted over on PC Gamer, a magazine I avidly read cover to
cover for years.
And perhaps even more excitingly for me, to see Dave post about it on his website!
This is the guy who has been responsible for more wasted more man-hours than I’ll ever
manage.
Who made Dust2!
As well as others that are still included in the game.
And he’s a nice guy too.
2016 has been a year where a lot of great things have happened.
So many things, so quickly that I feel I take them for granted.
It would be my younger self who’d appreciate them the most and yet that’s the one person
I can’t show these things to!
Really though, as much as everything seems to have changed, in reality I’m still sat
here in front of my PC in my underwear as I always have been.
The screen may be larger, the computer faster but minute-by-minute the experience hasn’t
changed that much.
But it is nice to occasionally look up from my work and to see that the stuff I do is
appreciated.
Yet as my viewer-base grows I do feel like whatever I produce also has to grow.
Sometimes I feel a bit like an elephant in a room, where whatever I do will probably
break something.
For some of my videos it can take weeks of back-and-forth with various people and multiple
video iterations before I’m happy to release them.
It’s a far cry from when I used to just load up Hammer and Hypercam and churn out
a video within an hour.
And I’m afraid that I don’t have anything especially exciting to reveal to you this
Christmas.
But following Dust_PCG’s re-release I’ve been working on my own version that addresses
some of the issues the original had.
I’m going to keep it separate from the main release though, as I think it’s important
to document the past as best as we can.
I started by moving the Terrorist spawn back.
I didn’t have a particular distance in mind, just chose a large change and if it now becomes
CT-sided then we know the sweet spot is somewhere between these two distances.
I added a new entrance for CT’s to bombsite B, using the classic hole-in-the-wall approach.
I adjusted the sight lines so if they choose to, CTs can remain hidden for longer as they
approach the site.
I removed those 64-unit jumps you had to do.
I did this by adding small invisible slopes as you approach the jump to give you a few
units’ advantage.
I also smashed through this wall to make movement in general a lot easier.
And then I clipped everything up and changed the lighting.
Firstly by making the shadows blue to reflect the sky (quite literally), and secondly by
rotating the ENTIRE MAP around 180 degrees.
I dunno, I just felt it made more of the map feel sunny.
See what you think.
And lastly, having to remove the swirly dust effects that were present in Source was a
great tragedy.
CS:GO really isn’t good for that kind of thing.
You can see what it looked like if I kept them in here.
But there is one beautiful particle effect that I once saw in Baggage, just here.
I placed this around the map and really think could start a trend with it cos it’s a pretty
feature and not too intrusive.
But why stop there?
I’m seeing user-made versions of Dust_PCG popping up on the workshop, which is really
great.
And Dave himself has thrown down the gauntlet by saying how interested he’d be to see
this map remade with CS:GO’s graphics.
Is anybody up to this challenge?
I’m not.
Until then, my updated version of the map is available to play on the servers right
now.
This map hosting that started this year has become something I’m very proud of.
It has become a community and one that has opened up a lot of possibilities.
So a genuine thank you to Pulse Servers for providing these- you can get an additional
20% discount on their services by using the code ‘kliks’.
And thank you to all of you guys for making this a reality.
And so close to Christmas!
I wish you a merry Christmas and a happy new year.
Nah I’ll probably edit out that singing at the end because it’s really embarrassing.