Professional game development seems to revolve around the art of quick hacks. Gamers aren't going to care whether your code is clean or not, and they sure as hell won't want to wait for you to tidy it up.
But the weird thing here is that Source is based on GoldSrc which was based on Quake; apparently, instead of learning from years of experience and building a brand new engine without the baggage, they decided to just keep building on top of the old stuff?
I mean to a point I get it, but if some code is unmaintainable, you don't keep trying to fix it, you have to decide to replace it.
Valve has no excuse, they make crazy amounts of money, they can fund the development of a new engine from scratch easily. They just choose not to.
>Valve has no excuse, they make crazy amounts of money, they can fund the development of a new engine from scratch easily. They just choose not to.
It admittedly gets a bit more difficult when these hacks and quirks are part of what create the unique feel of your game engine. People have played CS at such high levels for so long that switching engine at all is likely going to introduce some difference in feeling, even if you think you've accounted for all the unique bugs and interactions. If you remade Quake 3 in a new engine, people are going to hate it. See Quake 4, for example.
Source 2 would still be a nice jump for CS:GO, but the team just doesn't have the resources at present to get this all done. Dota 2, being the style of game that it is, isn't as affected by a difference in feel as a first person twitch shooter.
> It admittedly gets a bit more difficult when these hacks and quirks are part of what create the unique feel of your game engine
Oh, the memories! I was so upset when bunny-hoping was mostly removed when CS:GO was released. I played the HNS (hide-n-seek) mode in CS 1.6 more than the normal game-mode. Most of the HNS mechanics were based on game bugs: bunny-hopping, long-jump (sync mouse movement with player movement), edge-bug (not dying if you fall from any distance on a 90degree edge at a specific distance), jump-bug (not dying if you fall from any distance if you jump exactly before you hit the ground), surfing (gaining almost infinite speed when sliding horizontally across a tilted surface).
I actually stopped playing CS entirely because this mode could not be accurately reproduced with the new CS:GO physics engine.
CSGO still has bhops, longjumps, surfing, and jumpbug; I think jumpbug is harder and I'm not sure about edgebug. Was there really such reliance on jumpbug and edgebug in this game mode?
So apparently not only bhoping is harder (jumping window much smaller), the default speed is also capped at a very low value (300), where in 1.6 it was uncapped and you could have easily reached 400-500 speeds while bhoping.
So, although changes are not clear, all of those who did play HNS before agree that mechanics are different and it just doesn't feel the same, you don't have the same freedom, it feels a lot more sluggish.
I am not sure this was always the case with CS:GO.
I know there are servers now that have those type of modes, but I think they have to use some custom server parameters for the physics to make it work more like it used to do.
I remember when I first tried CS:GO coming from 1.6 when it came out, there were no HNS servers as the default physics model really didn't allow for bhops and longjumps the way it used to work. Or maybe, even if somehow it still allowed for those things, the mechanical difference was too big so it didn't feel the same.
In the end I "just" played like 1000 hours in CS:GO and quit the game as there was no real HNS replacement as it used to be. I still played the normal mode for 1k hours as there were a few very nice 24vs24 servers were everyone was using microphone and try-harding.
> Source 2 would still be a nice jump for CS:GO, but the team just doesn't have the resources at present to get this all done
That is surprising. I had assumed that CS:GO was an incredibly steady cash cow. IIRC, CS:GO pioneered the digital collectibles + loot box market, and has somewhere between 600k to 1.1M+ active players during any given day. https://steamcharts.com/app/730
The trading market also seems particularly active and Valve takes a cut of each transaction of their digital goods. It's an attractive model. There are dedicated companies that have sprung up around it and seem to prosper.
Other indirect indicators seem to be green as well. Back when it was a phenomenon, it sold at least 25M+ units before it was made free-to-play. This is on par with Minecraft. The installed player base is in the hundreds of millions. It's essentially a giant social network with multiple monetization opportunities.
I am struggling to see how this wouldn't be profitable.
Surely, Valve must make enough in a month to hire 50+ people and give them 18 to 24 months to re-write the engine?
The guy who wrote the tweet in the OP regularly posts publicly about the internal structure and politics at Valve. Reading through that gives me the impression that money is never a factor at Valve, and it's all about 1) whether anyone cares enough to work on a project and/or 2) whether someone is trying to impress/kiss-ass to climb the social pyramid.
I can't imagine the idea of rewriting CS:GO from scratch just to improve maintainability is going to get very far.
Plus players will 100% notice even the tiniest changes, and will complain about it forever. A game like CS:GO will never die, just look at the player numbers for its predecessor which has 6000-7000 daily active players.
> Plus players will 100% notice even the tiniest changes, and will complain about it forever. A game like CS:GO will never die, just look at the player numbers for its predecessor which has 6000-7000 daily active players.
this. to any readers unfamiliar with the community, it's hard to overstate how much cs players abhor change.
> It admittedly gets a bit more difficult when these hacks and quirks are part of what create the unique feel of your game engine.
An example of this in the Quake 3 engine (and now permanent behavior in the CS series) is air strafing. It's a glitch in how Quake 3 handles motion vectors. But it's now also enshrined behavior, complete with entire game modes in CS built around it (KZ & surf maps). If you went and made an entirely new engine, or even just used something off the shelf like Unity or Unreal, you'd have to add that bug back. It's core to the gameplay now.
To add to the list of 'bugs that are now features', in SF2 'combos' were a bug, they were not intended to be part of gameplay. Their inclusion is arguably the basis of the 1v1 fighter genre.
To add on, players like this feel enough that this behaviour is very convincingly replicated by Riot in Valorant, which is a CS-like game on Unreal engine.
I think it's reasonable to remember that Half-Life 2 or Source goes back to days when Valve was still just a gamestudio. So they didn't have the resources they have now. Yes original Half-Life, expansions and Counter-Strike were popular, but Steam for one wasn't a thing. But they weren't printing money yet. So spending time on engine with a ambitious game wasn't something they had money or time for.
And then Global Offensive is title originally developed by third-party. So I don't think those guys either were going to put huge effort in engine. And once it got going, there is little push to replace it again. Specially when it's raking massive amounts of money in even in the state it is...
