CS:GO Hammer and engine updates

seth

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May 31, 2013
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Valve posted a blog entry for some new lighting and shader improvements made to CS:GO today following Operation: Wildfire, and there is some really cool stuff they go over. For an engine over a decade old, this is some real good shit right here.

- improved -staticproplighting (fires more rays when calculating, no more blotchy shadows on props)

01.jpg


- improved phong shading on world brushes (tf2 does not have this capability)

06.jpg


- addition of anisotropic reflection emulation (think of the ripple and stretching effect of city lights reflecting on water at night)

10a.jpg


- more memory allocation to hammer for improved in-editor performance. Not sure of how much of an impact this has, but in other hammer news, they also added a nuke_zoo to the sdk content that is full of all of the new assets introduced in the new nuke in a bunch of categorized sections, most of which are tintable, modular, and skinned. Could this also mean more theme libraries in the future? I hope so, this one is cool as shit.

14.jpg


- support for a 2nd uv set (created so the artists could put high-res decals on some crate models in different locations to create variety and uniqueness)

07.jpg


- selective tinting on models with multiple textures. I assume this can be used for infinite color variations on multi-mapped models, like the forklift here.

13.jpg


- cubemaps influenced by environment light brightness and color, for more tonally accurate reflections and special effects. They say it can be good for areas with hard shadow transitions as well.

11b.jpg


There's more, go read the entry here. I'm wigging out over CS:GO right now holy fuck.
 

Pocket

Half a Lambert is better than one.
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Nov 14, 2009
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So that first screenshot... does that mean they already added lightmaps on props and I missed it?
 

seth

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May 31, 2013
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So that first screenshot... does that mean they already added lightmaps on props and I missed it?

Prop lightmaps in TF2 have been around since rd_asteroid was first released, so I can only guess it's been in CS:GO at least that long.
 

Pocket

Half a Lambert is better than one.
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Nov 14, 2009
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Back when they added phong-on-lightmaps, people were asking Valve to add lightmapped models, so apparently not.
 

seth

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May 31, 2013
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Finding some interesting things poking about in Hammer and GCFScape.

A large portion of the models used in Nuke get their color from a tinting parameter in the prop_static's properties in Hammer. Most of their diffuse maps are just white. They essentially act as ambient occlusion layers to define shadows and highlights and are then tinted to whatever color is needed in Hammer.

A similar process is done with materials, though this isn't a new thing. The blue stripes adorning many of the outside walls in Nuke are actually the same texture as the rest of the wall, just tinted blue in a separate VMT using $color. This saves on storage space since no extra VTF's are used.

The decals are not visible in Hammer. They are generated using a single VTF with a collection of warning and information labels and another VMT that enables the decals for that model. I can only assume they are then procedurally generated on the second UV map Valve added support for when the map is compiled. This is how all the crates seem to have a random assortment of warning labels and other stickers, despite there only being a few separate crate models.
Back when they added phong-on-lightmaps, people were asking Valve to add lightmapped models, so apparently not.

You're probably right, I have not kept up with CS:GO much at all until the Wildfire update.
 
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Pocket

Half a Lambert is better than one.
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Incidentally:
To tackle this problem we separated all direct and indirect precomputed lighting data
This is more or less how I thought dynamic shadows worked already — storing the first bounce and subsequent bounces in two separate lightmaps and turning the former off if dynamic shadows are enabled. So yay me for figuring that out before Valve did, I guess.
 

Vel0city

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Dec 6, 2014
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We need this.

We need all of this. Just because.
 

Werewolf

Probably not a real Werewolf
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Apr 12, 2011
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We need this.

We need all of this. Just because.
What's the actual chance of us getting those improvements though? I know Valve have been taking more community made maps for TF2, but it seems to me that in the long run CS:GO is their flagship they want people to create content for.
 

Vel0city

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Dec 6, 2014
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What's the actual chance of us getting those improvements though? I know Valve have been taking more community made maps for TF2, but it seems to me that in the long run CS:GO is their flagship they want people to create content for.
It's slim.
 
Dec 28, 2014
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What's the actual chance of us getting those improvements though? I know Valve have been taking more community made maps for TF2, but it seems to me that in the long run CS:GO is their flagship they want people to create content for.

Doesn't CSGO run on a newer version of the Source engine then TF2? It may not be possible for TF2 to receive some of these upgrades, though if it is possible I imagine they'll want to include them in TF2 as well.
 

Freyja

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Jul 31, 2009
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Doesn't CSGO run on a newer version of the Source engine then TF2? It may not be possible for TF2 to receive some of these upgrades, though if it is possible I imagine they'll want to include them in TF2 as well.

Well, yeah, updating TF2's version would be the idea.
 

Fruity Snacks

Creator of blackholes & memes. Destroyer of forums
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Sep 5, 2010
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I was saying this all last night during the conversation in chat about it.

CSGO's engine might as well be Source 1.5, porting these features back to older versions could potentially prove to be just flat out not worth it. From what I understand of this stuff (which isn't as much as I'd like) it'd be easier to forward port TF2 to CSGO's engine... but even then, the amount of work needed might not be worth it.
 

Pocket

Half a Lambert is better than one.
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Nov 14, 2009
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I wonder how integrated the gameplay code for TF2 is with the rendering engine code. If it were me, I'd have kept them as separate as possible, to the point where it would have been possible — not easy, but possible — to lop off the gameplay part and lop it onto the other engine wholesale. Even then, though, I'd want to go back and redo basically everything — upgrade the textures to an acceptable resolution for a modern game, retool the models so they're actually the correct relative scale (seriously, some of the office props are just tiny compared to the player models), rebuild all the maps accordingly, and probably rewrite all of the code that's been giving them so much trouble over the years because it wasn't built with a loadout system in mind from the get-go.
 

Vel0city

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Dec 6, 2014
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And while they're at it, give Source some proper multi threading instead of the crap system we have now, get rid of DX9 (Vulkan or DX11), make TF2 not so heavily bound to the CPU, etc.
 

Pocket

Half a Lambert is better than one.
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So basically just finish Source 2 and port everything over to that.
 

hutty

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Mar 30, 2014
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Valve adds new rendering features to tf2 quite a bit actually like lightmapped models and texture streaming. I would expect more with the upcoming comp update.

I don't see a TF2 source 2 port happening.

If source 2 were to get involved, I would imagine they would do TF3, a from-scratch remake utilizing the new physics engine and a separate inventory to clean up some of the regrettable decisions during tf2's development (lime paint, ugly hats, cp_egypt, sniper). And I don't care how used to it all the try hard, quake veteran, soldiers are. Needing to jump+crouch+shoot in a split second to rocket jump feels glitchy and broken. Also loose cannon balls feel like they have a vague approximation of the concept of mass, and grappling to someone in mannpower should come with a preemptive seizure warning.