I know right? This kind of enthusiasm for journalism is sorely missed in the gaming community. And the fact that he took time out of his own freetime just to travel to Italy and Morocco for a work trip instead of going on a holiday? Truly a soon-to-be Pulitzer-award-recipient.

By going he also made sure the update would drop. Two birds with one stone

"For the most part, the shadows actually looked better in real life than in Source 2, though I couldn't help but notice this particular shadow was still somewhat blocky around the edges. God pls fix."

Someone's gotta do it.

it's a tax write-off

Bro thought we wouldnt notice

Wtf bro how do you post 6 days ago

Bruh

How did you comment 6 days ago?

bro time travelled

I hope 3kliksphilip's brother left a sticky note on the door frame.

Truly sadge

hits too close to home

it is definitely relevant to comment on how bad the movement feels considering how important it is to many CS players...

He EVen go MORocco to doublr cheCk the shadow.!

​@@ElderlyAnteaterit feels the same dude

@@loganatori6117 hmm I wonder what "9 months ago" means?

@@ElderlyAnteater means you're an idiot lmao

In physics, albedo is the fraction of light which you reflect. So, you can represent it as the base color, “this is what the material will reflect if hit with white light”

@@Fs3i idd, it existed before the push towards PBR as it's commonly used as base colour.

In other words, it is essentially just the Diffuse Map

@@quintonlee4107 nah its more like Albedo is the base color and Diffuse is the light scatter

​@@quintonlee4107 Not really - think of a diffuse map (in the Source Engine sense) as an albedo with more baked in information, such as shading and whatnot. It worked for years but the drive for realism has left these mostly outdated as you can only really add on normal maps for faux depth, and specularity to make it more/less shiny. The goal of albedo maps are to be as flat as possible; essentially they're just the base colors that you'd see if a white light was shined at the object. You then add on extra information such as roughness, metalness, and normal maps, which light will interact with to create a physically based material that looks far more accurate. These materials can adapt entirely to different environments and lighting conditions while diffuse maps are much more static.

is he wrong though

My monkey brain's single neuron wants to lick it

Thousands of reflective balls

You're everywhere dude

I literally just stopped the video after hearing this and went straight to the comments

I used to think making games couldn't be very hard, not that I add ever done a game but in my mind it was "how hard can it be, if there's so many people doing it?" so I decided to learn programing and do a game of my own and ... I quickly found out that making games, specially alone, is very hard.

furry detected

​@@awsomebot1furries probably do more to benefit society than you do

@@cul-de-sac I'm sure all the furry art they commissioned has been really beneficial to human progress LMAO

Why wouldn't they just perform a per-vertex lighting calculation using the dot product of the surface normal and the camera angle? It looks to me like the classic fake lighting used in the early 3D games like star fox. Is there something I am missing? Edit: OP literally just made this up. Blender has a Viewport Shader tab with a "Studio Lighting" and "Matcap" option. The author of this comment seems to have extrapolated that the similar looking lighting in the Blender software means that these Source 2 options are using those techniques. The use of Matcaps is largely limited to sculpting software. Studio Lighting is Blender specific so it doesn't make any sense to say that Source 2 uses Studio Lighting for it's "halfbright".

@@awsomebot1 i know a furry who owns a pharmacy so.

love you phil!

You either live long enough to die the hero or die long enough to villain the whatever.

This shit is so corny as hell

thanks! very helpful

Thanks!

Bot nav maps could be a way of doing that, so good idea!

@@SingeStheos yeah, its greedy mesh algorith in 3D. Honestly someone should contact Valve with this idea XD I think it could be absolutely massive

You can probably interpolate between probes, so I think it would be worse to implement your idea (same result on dense regions, bad ones on other regions). Plus the fact that there are so many probes everywhere shows that it does not come with too much of a performance / map size issue. Only question left is compilation time. Well if you are willing to increase the density locally, you're gonna have at least the same overall complexity I am guessing.

Using non grid-based probes requires a separate table of probe positions used for finding the closest probe to each dynamic objects' position instead of rounding the position to a grid and indexing. This introduces huge performance costs because searching through a large, irregular table takes much, much longer than indexing. To avoid this (using a grid-based system), more likely locations for dynamic objects could include grids at increased fidelity. This is an decent solution for performance because it avoids long search times, but this comes at the cost of more file size. A separate table is required to denote where these increased fidelity grids are, and finding light data requires a few extra steps during runtime, especially in areas more common for the player to traverse, which introduces extra lag in possibly the worst place in the physical game world, where players spend most of their time. Also, the data structure naturally contains some redundant data where grids may overlap, especially in high-density areas (the most important). To avoid using this unnecessary disk space, either the data will be irregularly spaced (introducing more runtime lag again), or the data structure will be indexed in such a way that avoids duplicate data by writing over unnecessary bits. This is complex from a memory-management perspective, as well as a customizability perspective. Similar algorithms (that actually prevent this redundancy problem) do exist, but optimizing it for CS2 purposes may be difficult (it's hard to say, really), and creating custom maps or adding objects to the scene forces lighting recalculations. This is technically an option, but makes custom projects using Source 2 much more complicated than using a regularly spaced grid to determine probe locations. Unless someone is using a powerful computer with lots of disk space, this is impractical. Also, somebody would actually have to create the Source 2 mod and a 3D heatmap editor for this to be implemented, because it certainly isn't a viable option for the masses. I do appreciate the good thoughts though! As someone who likes to create games in my spare time, it's always nice to see other people trying to solve these kinds of problems too, because eventually the best solutions will become commonplace standards among graphics software which nobody even really thinks twice about. If you also enjoy these (rather in-depth) software problem-solving situations, I recommend Nemean's video on the Fast Inverse Square Root as popularized by Quake. TL;DR I don't think this would work at all practically, especially not for the small improvements that this could make, but I enjoy the discussion nonetheless.

Low grav or noclipping players still need proper lighting applied to them. Weapons and grenades can also get launched into the sky and need to keep looking good.

didn't notice that at first, it sounds great. his attention to detail is incredible

I too would flex with my maps

Why

@@hellofoodthere8374cause usually nobody ever really pays attention to how much goes into a good looking game, people take it for granted.

nah they aren't

Probably more that its easier to just tell the mapping tool to calculate everywhere than it is to specify exactly where is playable and where isn't playable. I'd imagine if they have so many of them then they shouldn't take up that much space in the map file.

Or maybe they use less probes, but then when you enable this tool, it's generates these balls at an unreasonablely dense and far away space, and that their only purpose is to show you what objects would look like underneath them. But yeah it could also just be auto generated. Storage and vram are so inexpensive nowadays.

or maybe the peobe algoeithm is just optimised enoigh to reasomably use this amount of probes and get good results.

The real answer is that the mappers do specify exactly what areas to generate these probes for, but lighting will be BADLY broken for any dynamically lit object that exists in an area not covered by them, this means if you can potentially throw a grenade there (even if its outside the map) it needs to be covered. Some other objects like antennas and satellite dishes in the skybox also rely on this non-baked lighting to be lit properly. There are settings on the volumes that generate the probes however that allow you to generate them less densely which appears to be done here, with more probes densely packed into actual playable space vs outside the level.

There can be props moving about even outside the playable arae (i.e. the 3D skybox) e.g. planes.

It's a bit more complicated than that. Frustrum culling only culls items that fall outside the visible area; but not elements hidden by other elements in front. The GPU culling is more simillar to Z-buffering; where all the items are placed onto a blank canvas according to the camera view from closest element to furthest item, and if they are completely hidden; then they do not render at all. Thus skipping most of the rendering steps and improving performance.

@@ma1pa637 Yeah, GPU culling is more advanced. I was comparing frustum culling to area portals which only check if something is visible through the portal bounds.

I was looking for a comment that would explain this, thank you!

Note that all the probes here are baked/pre-calculated so they're actually quite cheap (which isn't the case in all game engines where probes can be used for real-time global illumination/reflections) There's a lot because it affects the lighting for any dynamic object moving around, but that's also used to lit the particles of smokegrenades, so it helps quite a lot for this.

Funnily enough, unity has recently implemented exactly the kinds of BALLS seen in CS2, look up adaptive probe volumes, it's pretty cool. (Adaptive probe volumes don't eat memory like old light probes, so it's fine to have tons of them)

@@leplubodeslapin They arent that cheap, thats still a lot o vram and disk memory. Still, in air they do nothing but waste space, and rebaking them each time you update the map must be a anightmare.

not true at all

@@googleslocik i've been using the CS2 tools for some weeks now and i can assure you it's fine :) maps are now compiled with the gpu and are using their ray tracing abilities, making it quite fast. A map i'm working on, that used to take 2 and a half hours to compile on Half-Life: Alyx (which was only using the CPU) now takes 20 min with similar settings. And for these 20 mins, it's like 25% visibility/occlusion calculations, 60% baked lightmap, and the probes are in what remains (along with navmesh calculation). When i said they're quite cheap i meant in comparison to the idea that they would be real-time, yes they're not free either ^^ It's not entiremy useless to have probes in the air, the volume they're in is also the volume where cubemaps can be effective. Anything outside won't have reflections, which turns metallic stuff to black, maybe that's an issue for visibility of grenades in the air ? (Speculating) In any case, there is a parameter to asjust the probe density in those volumes and each map creator can adjust those to help optimization. And grenades now go through map boundaries (skybox walls/ceiling) so maybe for future cs2 maps there won't be that much playable space above our heads (speculating again ^^)