I'm glad Nuke is getting overhauled. Somewhere around
Left 4 Dead, Valve decided to tone down the grittiness of the textures and go for a more stylized look, even in their "realistic" looking games, but Nuke was basically copypasted straight from
Counter-Strike: Source, textures and all, and it shows compared to the maps they actually redid like Office.
It's not a projected texture, it's a set of
cascade shadow maps that scale their resolution based on client location. It's a really cool system, but wouldn't really fit in TF2 style. Our shadows need to be more diffuse to look correct.
I'm not convinced that they do, but I'd love to see someone recreate a TF2 map in CS:GO and post some screenshots to prove me wrong.
Ironically, though, it looks like the first, outdoor screenshot was rendered with sharp shadows turned off, for some reason. Or is that something that automatically happens when you're far away?