CS:GO - Can Source 2? 

As it turns out, source 2 can

I just want an engine that doesn't force map makers to make their maps bland in order for it to actually run properly. As well as fixing all the serious bugs that we have been putting up with for years. Smoke occlusion, objects falling through the map, etc.

That last part in the cave really shown the improvements from 1 to 2.

What I see in this video is that Source 1 (an engine which will turn 20 yo soon!!) was absolutely ground breaking for its time. Looks stunning even today.

"I hope to do more" this pretty much tells me that Phillip is going to attempt to port de_sparity to S2 when it comes out and maybe rework it.

Source 2 is definetely one of the ones that can, at least in my opinion.

Small thing about the around 6 minutes mark: Ambient occlusion is only the "shadows in corners" stuff. Light bouncing to other surfaces and carrying colour is called indirect illumination, or more commonly global illumination. AO and skylight are usually included in GI solutions too.

There's a "GPU Ray Tracing Visualization" mode in S2 Hammer now, it was released in the latest Dota2 update, as well as a "CPU RT Spherical Harmonics" (real time GI). Plus they added or are working on "Meshlet" support (Basically UE5 Nanite).

Yes, source 2.

9:17 is a total humblebrag and i'm all for it

11:27 I did not expect those naughty words, bad philip, bad.

Theres a very important thing you missed in the reasons why Source 2 cubemaps look better: Source 2 cube maps are pre-filtered. This means that when they render a cubemap, they use magic light calculations that output several "levels" of blurry reflections. Then, according to the smoothness of the material, it chooses a level from the cubemap that its either blurry, clear, or somewhere in between. This way more rough surfaces that still reflect the world, like smudges, less polished surfaces, etc, show blurry reflections, and clear surfaces shows a clear one. There is a specific technique I saw on parallax cubemaps that fixes the outdoor sky issue. Weirdly enough I found it on SEGA's Sonic Forces, and havent found other examples, but I believe the technique its also used on Unreal engine. When they render cubemaps, they also save which pixels are actually the sky. When the game shows a reflective surface, when the reflection points to the sky, it swaps from the parallaxed cubemap, to an infinte cubemap thats just the sky. This way both close 3d models and the infinite sky are both perfectly reflected.

This video aged like wine

can confirm CS:GO can source 2 now

I reset my headphones around 11:46 because i genuinely thought a cord was loose or something 🤣

This aged well

Source 2 is coming to CS:GO at some point… And although I’m quite impatient about it, I’m sure Volvo is taking their time to implement it as perfect as possible. And please Phil, make more Source 2 videos, it’s fun to know how it differs from its predecessor!

It's interesting how many big games got caught in development hell due to engine problems in the 2010s: HL Alyx on Source 2, FFXV on Luminous, Cyberpunk on Red engine 4, MGSV on the Fox Engine to name a few.

It's awesome seeing you make a video about Source 2, as it's becoming more and more relevant to the CS:GO players. I hope we'll see more from you on this topic and perhaps while doing so, you will become one of us - a Source 2 addict. As for the 7:08 lighting bug, it is usually created when a scene is lit up with low amount of indirect light (generally low-light conditions) that is bounced around by relatively reflective materials. Without changing the lighting conditions, what will help is increasing the lightmap resolution (the Final compile is at 2k quality, but you can go up to 8k). You can also often encounter a similar bug, where the shadows appear "blobby" - they're not accurate and some parts are darker than they should be, while others are lighter. That happens when you have more than 4 lightsources with "Baked Light Indexing" checked, shining on the same surface - so try to avoid that by unchecking "Baked Light Indexing" for less important lights or by placing the lights in spots where they don't intersect (there's a special "Baked Light Complexity" scene view for that.) Oh and if you want to enjoy even MORE of cubemaps, there is a way to increase their resolution, by modifying the "EnvironmentMapFaceSize" and "EnvironmentMapRenderSize" values in your gameinfo .gi (located in game>hlvr>). Alright, I hope you'll have fun with testing the limits of Source 2 and if there's anything, I'd love to help.

Oh my God! Okay! It’s happening! Everybody Stay Calm! Everybody Stay Calm! EVERYBODY STAY FKING CALMMMMMMM

11:24 "and because its vr it benefits from having loads of piss and shit floating about in the air everywhere" that actually made me laugh out loud

Those corrected/parallaxed cubemaps gotta be my favorite graphical effect in games. I love all the bokeh and AO etc. and even film grain, but the cubemaps are satisfying to look at when set up like this. Lightweight solution for reflections and such a genius way of doing it. Mirrors in ps2 era games are very cool too. I notice how some games such as RDR2 use three different kinds of reflection types on water together. First there's general low quality cubemap underneath all, then ssr and where ssr isn't visible, there's some low quality looking 3D looking objects being reflected such as simple trees. In between those two effects. Not entirely sure what technique that is but yeah probably just to patch out what ssr can't accomplish and together none of it is barely ever noticeable.

Coming back here after valves 3 videos

6 months later and it happened!

Well, this video is soon to become a reality, and im honestly excited

I just love the part of source 2 where it says "it's sourcin time" truly the greatest 2 of all 2's

This aged like fine wine

There is no way it is a coincidence that the video is precisely 13:37 minutes long…

I love using parallax corrected cubemaps! In unity they're referred to as "box projected". I remember discovering them back in 2018(ish) when trying to make a map for VRChat and it absolutely blew me away how you can make a simple pre-baked reflection almost look a full proper reflection. That combined with pre-baked lighting and light probes (which allows real-time objects to receive pre-baked lighting, idk if source or source 2 has anything like that) really taught me just how clever games have gotten with emulating raytracing.

With hindsight? Yes.

Also I love all the suggestions in this list. It makes me think of something like a source 2 "mythbusting" or "fun facts" series of videos. Or even just full on source 2 mapping tutorials, including how you managed to get a first-person camera, loading HL:A maps and assets, etc.

That's an elite video. Can't wait to going back to mapping and making some portal 3 maps!

I remember I used to make maps on GoldSource & Source 1... I think I want to learn it again, especially the Source 2.

The source 2 lightning looks way nicer. The light is actually bouncing around and filling the space. I hope super dark spots *right* next to bright spots are soon to be gone in games (or at least minimized)

Source 2 also gives mappers control over the density of light probes which aids with grounding dynamic objects with the static objects. Light probes are light samples taken from different points in space(kinda like a 3d light map). In practice this means physics props, dynamic(animated) props, npcs, and players will blend in much better with the environment(depending on the map of course). One thing i forgot to mention a couple months ago is the lighting of static props in source 2 is leagues ahead of source 1.

EDIT: It turns out the Stanley Parable remake was made in Unity instead of Source. My bad! About the pre-calculated lighting improvements: I'm pretty sure Stanley Parable was done in Source 1, correct? And its remaster was done in the same engine, right? Yet the new remaster has vastly superior lighting. I was really impressed while playing it. I knew it was pre-baked but the lighting was so cleverly designed, and combined with higher resolution of the shadow maps it looked very moody and effective. It achieved the same effect as raytracing sometimes does, even if the environments and light sources are completely static.

I feel Portal/2 would work well in Source 2 because the lighting in those games is very important.

IT CERTAINTLY CAN

Oh my god that indoor parallax cubemap is GORGEOUS.

I'm really happy for you that you (now?) finally have a sponsor! I absolutely dig your videos bc I love everything related to Counterstrike. You've got a great sense of humor and you know how to make entertaining Videos. Please keep up the good work, you deserve every like and sub that you have and even more! As one of the greatest philosophers of our time once said: "Keep rollin', rollin', rollin', rolling YEAH" ;)

valve says that counter strike 2 will be released with the source 2 engine. cant wait for phillip to make a video about it.

This comment only comes out of a place in my heart for you, I absolutely loved this video and damn those Corrected cube maps do look like ray traced reflections however, I almost felt like you did not sell the first example comparison as well as you could have. The Source 2 baked lighting looks really good, it immediately reminded me of the ray tracing shader in Minecraft and that is high praise. Although I have been aware of the fact that Source 1 uses ray tracing to bake the lightning it just never looked like Ray tracing to me, it is very inaccurate and limited however with Source 2 even with its stock settings it looked very convincing, and I dont understand how you thought that just brightening up the Source 1 map made it comparable, that is strange coming from you. Even the most amped up Source 1 test map you shown here looked worse to me compared to what source 2 was providing.

I haven’t been this excited to fuck around with source game mechanics since your first mapping tutorial series. I can’t wait for the eventual CS update

I've listened to Deep in Thought so much while playing Snowrunner that I don't even associate it with your videos anymore. It's an amazing album.

Honestly, Source 1 is still impressive considering it launched in 2003. Source 2 is a general improvement

who's here on the march source 2 hype

I'm honestly kinda excited for Source 2 CSGO

By the way philip, if you don't know the brighter effect that Source2 has at the beginning is called 'Global Illumination'. And it's pretty much the last hurdle light renderers need to get through to have the standard 'good' lighting

8:11 and it has 10x the file size lol

After watching this video, I feel like watching your Source SDK playlist again. They had a certain charm to them. Great video as always.

This feels like an AD for source 2

PBR materials and higher resolution lightmaps really do wonders to how things look. Just looking at some of the maps and assets created for modern quake ports that support PBR, HDR lightmaps and realtime lighting there is a huuuuge difference even when compared to high resolution texture replacements using the old shader format (or lack thereof).

I really hope Valve makes Source 2 easy for wide use. I would love to see more games on other engines besides UE. Hell I’d love to make a source 2 game as well.

This has aged like a fine wine

those parallax corrected cubemaps are absolutely beautiful!

I keep rewatching your videos, a testament about their quality

hearing philip swear is just ugh - its painful. its like hearing your primary/elementary teacher swearing

I'd be really interested how you can squeeze out more performance from Source 2 vs source 1 and how much different graphics APIs (Vulkan vs DX9) can also pull out when on these two engines.

What a legend only one ad in the beginning . Your so damn underrated

You should upload a guide on source 2 map making, or how to get started on it, maybe throw in some mapmaking/lighting etc. tips here and there

Everyone always asks can source 2? but not how is source 2?

Source 1 compile time bounce lighting can be heavily affected by the $REFLECTIVITY settings in the VMT of the material being hit with a ray, so you can get good results clearing up dark areas by modifying this (it's RGB intensity iirc), perhaps making a duplicate VMT pointing to the same base material but with different reflectivity settings. Or you can just use the old dim floating light entity to mimic what you would expect from a bright light source (e.g Sun) bouncing into a nearby dark tunnel or something. I have to admit, I'm having major trouble understanding how to use Source 2's texturing, and I see some differences in your source 2 version of the map here texture wise I think, too. I'm sure it's much better and more technically "correct" for a modern engine, but I can't seem to hit a groove with it like I can in Source 1. Oh yeah, although CS:GO does have HRTF audio to replace the old surround system\or EAX from older source 1 games, source 2 uses Steam Audio for spatial audio, which I should think would be a lovely audio upgrade in terms of being able to hear exactly where the enemy is around corners. It runs on any OpenCL capable graphics card using Radeon Rays. Regarding volumetrics etc, these could actually AID gameplay. If a player gets in front of a light source, the volumetrics may help define them at distances or with obstacles in the way, I think? Or fog for players HIDING in intentionally in carefully chosen areas of the map. Convincing material surface shaders might also help with player readability regarding what surfaces act in certain ways, for instance things you can shoot through or break. BTW, for those that don't know, be careful decreasing lightmap scale in Source 1. It works by subdividing the face into smaller faces, but overlays have a maximum face limit. You may only have an overlay on one face, but if that face has a low lightmap scale, it is effectively many faces, and may hit the limit of how many overlays are allowed on the brush, getting a somewhat unhelpful error when trying to compile that you can't seem to figure out how to fix. Also, that clip of spyro made me remember how terrible the reignited collection portals are compared to the original. In the original Spyro 1, each portal had a completely separate vertex painting skydome visible only inside the portal frame for the level you were going to. Entering it seamlessly takes the camera inside, loads the level, and has spyro land in the new level without a single fade to black. Reignited just has a blurred cubemap and fades. C'mon, an original playstation with 1MB usable ram did it better :(

7:44 love his eager voice here

For some reason I forget that I have alredy liked the video while watching it, so when Im realising that I'm really enjoying the video I try to like it once again. I reliked this video 3 times =)

I really enjoy your informative videos as your explanations really make me feel like I am getting the hang of everything and you've even inspired me to pursue my dreams of creating games when I watched your videos about your games you've made in the past, I also enjoy all the music that's in your videos so I even tried making some of my own, I thought I'd comment this just to show my appreciation as I've been watching you for over 2 years now and I still don't get bored of your content. Keep doing as well as your doing and make sure you enjoy yourself because I enjoy it.

source 2 is definitely one of the game engines

not sure if you watched the fmpone crash course on s2 but if you make a cube map box that extends to the entire level it fixes the outdoor cube map issue, valve does this in alyx

I lived in Plymouth for 3 years and it's always nostalgic seeing it show up on this channel

It always amazes me how capable S1 is for how old it is. Sure it does show its age pretty clearly in some areas, but on a whole, you can make some quite spectacular maps with it. I feel confident saying that S2 is/will be the better engine, but it is still a testament to the hard work and forethought of the S1 developers that polished and good looking games can still be created with their engine nearly twenty years after it was developed. I think the middle of the video was a perfect length, it gave all the information clearly and provided good, readable examples of the features you were talking about. I don't think it dragged on at all and I was suitably entertained 🙂

The problem with updating CS:GO to Source 2 is just the simple fact that it requires more resources. With most every game released, most devs don't really care about making their games playable on old hardware, instead making it pretty, needing it to run on modern hardware. Valve is different. They want the game to still be playable for older and less powerful computers, and the community agrees. The backlash Valve faces every time they visually update a map shows that there's still a part of the community that plays on a decade old Integrated Graphics CPU chipset. Just by the example of the size of the maps and the increased load times, a lot of people using this old hardware will raise a fuss about it, because it will impact their ability to run the game in a playable state. Valve wants this game to be playable by everyone, no matter their set-up. It's one of the reason why CS:GO is still popular to this day. Even a decade old laptop could play this game with a little effort. A lot of people that can't play the new Call of Duty or other Triple-A shooter will play CS:GO instead, making the game continue it's steady and huge player base over the years. Updating to Source 2 would be nice, but the backlash the Valve could get from it just outweigh the benefits of the upgrade. There are still people to this day that complain about Aztec *cough cough*, I mean Ancient, being hard to run for their computers. A great example of this was the downgrades to TF2. Valve intentionally reduced a lot of graphical load, just to make the game more accessible to older hardware. Valve faced a little backlash for it, but the fact that more people being able to play the games, outweighs any outrage by the downgrades.

bro your vid made me want s2 even more, omfgggg

This is the last channel I expected to see Hydrophobia gameplay on

Let see if this video aged well or not

"Let's look at subtle lighting differences." RU-vid Compression: *How about no.*

Entropy: Zero 2 makes heavy use of the parallax corrected cubemaps, despite it being a Source 1 mod. And it looks really impressive.

s2 looks awesome. i can't wait to make maps for it

I don't think the performance will be dropped too much on Source 2, since the Source 1 with DX9 is poison the performance of modern hardware so much. For example, when War of Tank introduced the DX11, it almost doubled the FPS when compares with the DX9 version, it shows that how DX9 is inefficient. I think the Source 2 ver. CSGO can be made into having similar performance and visual qualities at lowest setting, while having the best graphics that can match the visual qualities of the modern 3A games at the highest setting, just let the player make the decision. I think it would be nice to see ray tracing on the community maps that doesn't need 300 fps+ for the lowest latency, such as the zombie escape maps.

beautiful video with a beautiful run time

Great little spot you made mate.

That's Plymouth at 09:16. Nice to see my city being represented in a video! :)

Love you soooo much all the work you put into this... Must take up a lot of your time.... Thankyou. :)

Holy... Philip you explain the cubemap part so well! I've known what cubemaps were for so long yet the way source 2 tackles it and the entire google earth explanation.. I had no idea.. Seriously, this may be a weird part I'm stuck on yet I'm really impressed.

I was not prepared for the "Floating piss and shit" section of this video.

I absolutely LOVE playing HL2 Sourcemods, Undersell, "the closure" (don't judge me!), Dangerous World, Exit, Exit 2, etc. so much fun was had in those worlds. imagining them in Source 2 makes me all tingly

What if we see history repeat itself? Counter Strike started as a Half Life 1 mod, so what if modders do it again, but turn Half Life Alyx into CS:GO 2? We're already seeing people shove Half Life 2 into Alyx, so I think it's only a matter of time before someone tries

12:45 Impressive, very nice. Now let's see Paul Allen make a cave.

I audibly yelped when the cave transferred from S1 to S2. Absolutely insanely good-looking. S2's graphics are absolutely insanely underrated. I haven't heard enough people talking about just how absurdly good it can look.

9:18 little quirks like these make me love this channel so much, its so serious yet so funny.

13:37 We see what you did there 3kliksphilip, good old leet 1.6 days :)

I havened made a map in like a decade, but the news at 13:13 sounds like a gd miracle to me. I absolutely HATED trying to find where in the hell I was getting a leak when I was a babby mapper.

Not sure if you’d be interested in this idea but, my introduction to you started with SDK tutorials which also got me into mapping and I’ve made successful maps on the workshop for tf2 and csgo. My suggestion is when csgo source 2 finally is out alongside a proper SDK, you can create tutorials for the next generation of mappers in source 2?

maaaaaan, i heard from their developer commentary that they also store directional information in the lights too, so they can do fancy things with baked light

Gone are the days where devs are super limited in resources and have to find unique workarounds for low specs. Now it's just bloat.

Honestly I think we’re getting incredibly close to having 3D digital environments that are nearly indistinguishable from the real world, and within the average person’s reach. Lighting has been a major hurdle for a long time, along with fluid simulation. We’ve recently seen both make huge leaps and now have very realistic simulations for both, but they require a lot of computing power. Right now it’s down to making those simulations more efficient and making computers more powerful. As process nodes are shrinking we’re getting closer. I’d actually be willing to bet that within my lifetime we’re able to make real-time simulations of entire worlds. Like, “we live in a simulation” kind of stuff.

the cave example was the better one. plus it shows a bit of a charm in source 1

Very good explanation and comparison. Superb content!

Whoa... Cube-shaped cube maps. That's unexpected.

this video didnt age well

Great comparison Klik, what software do you use to do the image comparisons? Thanks

when it comes to rendering in games, i always had that disconnect between how things would look in real life, and what you expect it to look like. sometimes, you feel, something looks super right and accurate but since youve never seen this situation for real, you cant say that it does, then you find a rl picture of something similar and you can see, how it really looks and feel "this is wrong" even tho it isnt