Hi! I’m celery- I was the artist on Prime. While helping 3kliks with this video and during the time of the map’s release I was interviewing at a few game studios. I’d love to let everyone know that I’m now a full time artist working at EA on the new skate game. I’d just like to thank the Counter-Strike community for so kindly welcoming this level, and my other work for CSGO. I wouldn’t have gotten to where I am now without the help of the rest of the CS community. Thank you so much for all the love!!!
to be honest, this is probably the most beautiful map I've seen in source. I don't care about how it'd play or any issues with how it interacts with certain gameplay mechanics. this is an incredible work of art.
@@LeDerpLegend Black Mesa's Zen is very beautiful, I agree, but it isn't meant to be realistic. this map has gone for a realistic look and it looks fantastic
I find it really interesting how "Pushing source to it's limits" usually means using Environment modeling techniques that have existed for years. Like I used to do a lot of amatuer mapping in Portal 1&2 and hl2 maps.... Now I have a few Mini campaigns in HL:A , But seeing these creative individuals Brut force an Aging engine to look better is so impressive. When I got a taste of Unity,UE and S2 it was so easy to see that with a Fraction of the effort you could make something that out shined Source mapping. To me it's like when modern artists Choose to oil paint, Purposefully choosing to use a technique used in the 7th century. Source can look gorgeous even today, but Imagine if they WEREN'T hindered by these tools they choose to use? Much love and deep respect to the Mappers if you're here!!! ❤️👌
yeah but its more of a ignoracne is bliss situation since you dont have to worry about draw calls, overdraw and dont have to Setup 30 different materials
Really interesting to see that this map was partly a predecessor to CS2s art style, soft ambient occlusion and exaggerated global illumination with really shiny and bumpy surfaces, only thing that’s missing is really bright and vivid contrast.
It was surprising to me too! Whether it was coincidence or not, I think I at least was able to capture the spirit of Counter-Strike's visual style while still pushing it in new ways.
As someone who is a friend of Wills I am constantly impressed by the amount of effort they put into their creations. When you talk to them they seem like a playful every day normal mapper. They seem nice and somewhat knowledgeable and never brag about their own skill. Hell I didn't even find out that Hive was their map till one night we we're playing on the map and i asked "damn this is so cool i wonder who made this." lol
@@DiggerDeeper01 I have a “map coin” for hive as a pin on my CSGO account plus there’s an Easter egg with my name in the map so it wasn’t that hard to believe I think lol
3kliks, this video was incredible. This new style of voice narrating is great and energetic, the editing is great and understandable, and it oozes passion for the subject. Glad to still be seeing improvements so many years later! Also, what a cool fucking map, I'm gonna download it for some wallpapers!
thing is, (as explained) it isnt. It heavily relies on baking PBR textures and materials down to sources ugly and relatively bad glossiness specular non pbr mess of a workflow. the only thing the source engine is doing is giving rough lighting information and information about transparency and reflection. source does raytracing when compiling a map. but modern tools are so much more efficient and realistic than this ancient game engine.
What a genuine way of selflessly promoting a hard-working university student. Getting them some deserved exposure for their skills and knowledge. Kudos to you too Philip!
@@C_Kava Hi! I'm in community college atm for an Associate's in Arts, and currently looking for a full-time job at a AAA studio, which I plan to then transfer and take 1-2 classes a semester to get a Bachelor's degree in game art.
@@celeryslice Keep up the great work dude! It really is amazing when you take a step back to see how far you've come and educated yourself doing what you like. As another college student working my way into game design, mad respect to you sir! Your work is very inspiring.
Your efforts in pronouncing Wolfenstein have not gone unnoticed - also great video overall, thanks for all the pretty footage, technical details and giving insights from the mappers themselves.
I really hope they will be able to pull off this kind of fidelity for all of their upcoming maps in source 2! Shouldn't be too hard considering the new tools they are given nowadays.
3:48 Here's a little unknown fun fact about this generator model, it's an early prototype model recycled from Half-Life 2's beta. Counter-Strike: Source tends to recycle a lot of old Half-Life 2 assets, such as the hostages using older versions of the citizen face maps, and one of the hostages even reuses the head of a cut scientist character Dr. Cohrt.
I've been making games and mods since before quake and honestly this video makes me quite melancholy. I've gotten older and the industry has seemingly passed me by. Stuff that used to be so intricate and complex but yet highly optimized to fit on a standard CD ROM was an absolute wonder... but now with the endless means of hardware headroom I feel like I've lost touch with what this is all about because honestly the limitations truly defined my works and what I was trying to accomplish. I've been hesitant for decades to opt into newer, alternative, engines and I just feel like I've missed the opportunity all together. I'm easily capable of creating maps like this, but I just don't understand the point of it all anymore.
The point has indeed shifted. But you don't have to change with it if you don't want to. There is still room for more retro-games and mods in between all the shiny surfaces. Games such as "papers please", "among us" and "minecraft looks like crap but sold millions, simply because they played well and filled voids. In fact, they would have sold less if they required a 2060RTX to run. Bit of a rant here, but there is no wrong choice. You can either just do what you know, or keep up with the never ending change. Old school car mechanics can't fix new cars, but they're still needed. It's the same everywhere. And if you are capable of creating good, small games I would say you are even at an advantage. There are a lot of games out there, but many are just copies of the same shiny turd.
@@flawmore No secrets here, but I would also say that there are new mechanics who cannot fix old machines. There are old systems written in languages for which the original programmers have died, and any left are able to charge a substantial premium; if they haven't already tendered their resignation and retired.
@@ButterfatFarms Old games: ever heard of Retro Gaming? UK Police are still using a computer system from 1972. FORTRAN and COBOL programmers are rare and expensive.
I really want to play this map myself just to feel how un-source it is. Just from visuals alone, it's stunning. The cracks and fractures in concrete, the wear and tear of pathways and walls, it all looks fantastic.
Easily the most beautiful Source map I've ever seen. It's incredible that there are people out there skilled enough to create a map like this in an engine as old and limiting as Source, or even at all.
Congratulations on hitting a million subscribers! I’ve been watching you since you had 300k on your main channel and I truly appreciate all the good content you brought to this community. Lots of love
I was about to comment on how Will's map felt like what Respawn had done with Titanfall (gritty maps using a heavily adapted version of Source) until you mentioned Will had based the map on Titanfall itself
This map is breathtaking. 3 times during my watch of this video did I almost have a heart attack because of: 1- The amount of detail on a skybox that is covered in clouds and fog 2- The amount of props that cover the map 3- The amount of WORK that went into each prop, basically making the entire map outside of source then porting it in Unfathomable.
I used to be really involved with the mapping community. I remember I ran a server that Celery used to be a member of. I love seeing these old names pop up in your videos. I only ever made one map but it was nothing special.
I am working on shrinking the audio portion of the map as we are reducing the overall file size of the map a bit. I am also referencing your video on reverb in cs:go to see which reverbs would be nice for each space. I can't wait to see people play this map! Will has been living and breathing this thing for so long now, and when he says a year, that's counting the entire 24 hours of each day. He is a madman.
Objects casting sharp shadows during overcast weather is my long time problem with videogames. I love cloudy days precisely because shadows are soft and blurry. Videogames can do it right simply by, say, rendering shadows in lower resolution and applying a bit of blur, yet many still don't.
Looks amazing, I can't even imagine the effort even one of the porting techniques would take. (and always nice to hear they/them used properly, thanks kliks ❤️)
As someone who is has been learning all facets of game development for the past 3 years and have learned quite a bit about how levels and graphical content for games are created, I have a deep appreciation for people like WIll who take dated engines like Source to their limits to create masterpieces like these. I don't even play CS:GO anymore but would happily take a stroll to explore the map just to look at all the work put into it. PBR has become such a massive part of modern game development and does so much for prop and level artists that sometimes I forget older engines like Source don't support it. I struggle to imagine the countless hours poured into reproducing the effects PBR offers manually. Source 2 can't come soon enough for games like CS:GO and even Dota.
Hi!!! Thank you so much! I authored all my assets in PBR and then tried to tune the Source shaders as best I could to mimic it. Not much control, especially on masking reflections in areas that should be shadowed, so a lot of it needed to be subdued :(
@@ROBST3RR Yes, they have backported portions of Source 2 to Source 1. This means that stuff like the UI and audio engine have been adapted from Source 2 code to work in CSGO. This does not mean that a map can be made in Source 2 Hammer (Hammer 5) and ported to CSGO; at best, individual models can be created and baked in Hammer 5, then imported to a CSGO map (which is likely what's going on). Stuff like brushes or displacements just don't really exist in Source 2 the way they they do in Source 1 (there are analogs, but they work completely differently).
I remember first watching your videos over a decade ago now to make maps for myself in Garry's Mod. I kept on making maps for personal projects up to SFM, once thinking "if a map were made with all props, it wouldn't have those mushy shadows that brushes have. It would be like a scene built in SFM in an empty map." Glad to see someone has tried that out. The result is phenomenal.
This is kinda making me reconsider my life choices as this is stuff we have done at my job for the past 6 years. Never thought to try to port the lessons learned into Counter Strike. Pretty much everything minus Displacements is stuff I'm familiar with. Also fun fact the bus depot HDR image at 7:49 is used in Designer, and is also the default skybox for the Operators screen on Rainbow Six Siege.
@@steveskeletonneii6336 3D Artist for a simulation company. We pretty much make computer games involving electrical boxes and wire circuits that teach electricians how to not electrocute themselves. My art director was a fan of hiw game studios do 3D art so we've followed that type of workflow
If CS:GO ever gets that Source 2 treatment, I'm sure as hell gonna miss all these crazy well-detailed maps that just do their best to use tricks to make a map for a 2004 engine look truly astonishing. Source 1 might be visually dated, old, janky and awful to work with nowadays but the fact we could create stuff ranging from maps, animations, amateur mods, fully fledged games and more cool stuff that it just makes it impossible for me to NOT admire it for all those years it stayed with us since release of Counter-Strike: Source and Half-Life 2.
I don't think we'll miss out on such maps. There are millions of people playing cs and probably thousands of mappers, there are so many creative people out there who would want to go even beyond the limitations of source 2
@@fitmotheyap beside that, porting it to Source 2 would require users to buying a new PC because of system requirements (mostly for those who have a old PC back in early 2010s), not only that, it would break tons of (Source 1) workshop mods/addons/etc... that was unconverted to S2, such as very old one that wasn't been updated a long time while also having the developer inactive for long time. The developer inactive thing may be solved by another modder by decomplie the map but however, doing with something like 100.000+ maps or more would take times, and so with porting them to S2.
It is incredible how much time and effort some CS:GO creators put in their work. And I don't mean just map creators. I mean video content creators like 3kliksphilip that are digging deep into the process of creation, bringing a new angle most of us don't have access to, map creators that are trying to bump up the level design game in a CS:GO that is old and limited by an outdated engine, skin designers that are trying to create different styles of gun skins and so on. The respect I have for those people is enormous and I am so happy when I see that somebody is chasing their passion, even if that passion it is not necessarily very profitable.
I was so zen listening to Kitten's background ambient sounds next to Philip's music. Incredible work by Will to get astounding breathtaking visuals, huge props to them for pushing through, and using the best (imo) AA method for foliage 😏
in my early days of map making (back in 2001--yes that i'm old) 1% of my map consisted of props, but back then they were referred to as 'prefabs'. the rest were just models so a lot of the time if i wanted a custom prop on the spot, like a chair or something, i had to model it myself. i hardly relied on pre-frabricated models that was already provided in the half-life valve hammer editor.
I think that the Titanfall inspiration also had been a motivator of how the Source engine can look. I think people forget that Titanfall and Apex Legends runs on Source
@@pinkmail6841 And Source 2012 is highly tweaked compared to 2004. And they tweaked in some more in 2015 when Newke came out. They just haven't put quite as much work into it as Respawn did because there was always this nagging sense of "Why put in the effort when we're already working on a way better engine... it'll be ready any day now... any day now..."
This is awesome! I've been learning model creation and a lot of this is very relevant. Particularly in older games, baking in lighting to the texture itself through things like ambient occlusion or on the model with vertex colours can really help to create more authentic light when it can't be shown by the game's lighting engine.
Working in spite of the limitation and issues allows for such creativity to flourish. Same as many games done on hardware that had no business being able to run such impressive games. Granted some minor silly issues like smokes breaking and not working correctly with the models in the map should be fixed. But seeing such creativity and detail in more drawn non PBR style is very refreshing and nice to see. I dont like PBR in most cases i seen, tho these cases were mostly awful like Warcraft 3 Reforged which by its destruction of og Wc3 ruined both word 'reforge/reforged' and some of technologies for me like PBR because of its disgusting and unnecessary implementation in something that should be down to earth, faithful remaster, but is anything but such.
It’s super easy to make stylized art/materials in physically based renderers though. It’s just up to what the people using it want to make. Essentially exactly what was just shown in this video lol. They defied pretty much all Source conventions and expectations to create this map, just like you can defy PBR guidelines to make something less “real.”
I’d argue that the biggest problem people have with PBR rendering doesn’t have anything to do with the tech itself, but rather the software used in that more modern workflow -mainly Substance Painter. It’s very easy to use the default grunge maps and edge wear/dirt generators to create something that looks fairly good, but also very samey and distinctly “PBR” looking. The software pushes you towards a particular art style that isn’t totally suited for every project. Of course, the same could be said for traditional non-PBR rendering, back when artists made heavy use of AO maps straight from Xnormal and photosourced textures mashed together in Photoshop. Ultimately, an artist’s toolbox goes a long way towards defining their style, and it’s important to be conscious of that particularly when trying to emulate a art created in a earlier era, using a different set of tools.
It's so crazy how different our views are. I'm born in 05, so I grew up playing mw2 with my brother and Crysis etc. So I'm fostered in too a higher quality of graphics. So when i play cs, pubg etc i always use the lowest possible settings and stretched, because I think it's over rated with pretty colors and high textures. compared too you that have followed the whole development of graphics and seem to get excited by every little foward step hih. sorry for the long comment, just wanted too share:)
Man, that's gotta be one of the most beautiful and detailed CS:GO maps I've seen. I'm a sucker for those swaying trees. Really love the aesthetic as well, having derelict buildings in a forest, kinda reminds me of something like Half life 2 episode 2.
Just goes to show that art direction is always going to triumph over fancier new graphics. You can have the most up to date polished renderer there is and still have a map look like garbage because you smear fog and bloom everywhere and have no care for the aesthetic.
@@AlphaGarg That's not new or fancy, even GoldSource used baked raytraced lighting lol. What I mean is the actual renderer, here there's no PBR, no true volumetrics, no real time specular reflections or realtime shadowed point lamps, etc. nothing like you might see in newer engines. The point is those don't make a better looking game on their own.
@@Jofoyo ... well, no, most textures for GoldSrc props (like the ones in Decay, Condition Zero, or Paranoia) were either digitally painted by an artist or photobashed. Perhaps I should've been clearer instead of assuming you watched the whole video. I'm not talking about VRAD, I'm talking about the use of external tools, in this map's case Substance Designer and Substance Painter. Meaning there is (rather, was) PBR, just not in real time, as it was all baked onto the textures beforehand by the artist. I'd say that's fairly fancy technology, especially considering the GPU requirements for Substance Painter. Also, there very clearly are specular reflections all over this map. Philip even made a point of showing it, since that's the sort of stuff the map creators were teasing him with before giving him access to a version of the map itself. In the end, though, I do agree that style beats tech. It's why games like Portal 2 and Left 4 Dead 1 and 2 age so much better than some of their contemporaries like Gears of War and Skyrim. It's just that, in this case, most of that style was only possible thanks to tech that I'd personally call fairly modern.
@@AlphaGarg I'm very aware of their use of Substance and it's demands which aren't as bad as you make it out to be, I used to use it on my shitty GTX 750, it was just slower and struggled with 4k textures. And I did watch the full video. But what I am talking about is real time specularity with shadowing and clear parallax, and such shading on all surfaces, the entire point of my initial comment is we don't need full real-time lighting, and GI, and everything else that people keep praising as a magic bullet, for something to look good. That is what I mean by fancy and new graphics, I'm sorry my definition of the word confused you. I'm talking about actual render fidelity, not texture trickery. My vrad comparison is just that, a comparison, it's similar to what they're doing, just on models, baking their own lighting and AO into the mesh textures. Something plenty of games have done in the past. Philip even compares the fidelity of the map to id tech 5 iirc, from 2010. All of this has been possible for at least a decade. But even then they had better lighting and shaders than what source has.
I also thought baking light on the textures could tickle the best out of a csgo map. But could we get even further? Is it possible to implement animated models like water fluid? I thought about to build a map with a breaking dam when the bomb explodes where the breaking dam is a baked animation. How far can the source engine go? All I know of animated models are the fan in inferno and the heli rotors in several other maps.
If you played Half Life Ep 2, I think there's the bridge scene in the beginning that nicely collapses that I think uses it's own animations. And I also think the End Of The Line Train scene where it flies and destroys the building into a bunch of chunks is also some what a separate animation? Dunno if those types are what you're referring to?
@@RickTheSmugLord Yes you are right. But I think the bridge is animated only partially. There are bending rails but the rest looks like its just a lot of single models that fall apart. But even the bending rails are a big thing. Do you mean the exploding citadel in episode 1?
I don't see why it couldn't be done. Team Fortress 2 uses those. Bread Space comes to mind, albeit a smaller scale than a dam breaking. Something that massive could still be done, however. Just needs a lot of time.
I've probably logged 10k+ hours in Hammer over the years, and I'm still fucking floored by how good an engine release in 2004 can be made to look in 2022.
Nice video Philip! It was great to see a more technical video about the source engine and the work mappers have to do to make their models look good in cs go. I think this sort of applies to skin making as well, as you often see skins with custom light data baked in to them even when using normal maps. For the extra detail/looks
This is incredibly impressive. I'm always fascinated with the CSGO mapping scene's focus on creating lots of bespoke assets for maps - there's some people in the TF2 mapping scene who take that approach, but by and large most people are interested in smart reuse of existing assets. This is an approach I'd personally never enjoy doing, but I'm glad to see other people pushing what's possible in this archaic engine.
It makes sense to do a lot of sharing for TF2, especially since when most of the assets for that game are purely diffuse and maybe have a normal map. When I was working on Prime, I wanted to emphasize material responses, lighting, and making the most out of Source’s shaders. Since most assets available for Source do not make best use of the engine, creating assets from scratch was the best way to achieve a polished and cohesive aesthetic.
This is very interesting to talk about, super hyped to see the future of Valve in general! All of this just keeps making me thing of an Orange Box 2 even more.
Hi! I’m celery- I was the artist on Prime. While helping 3kliks with this video and during the time of the map’s release I was interviewing at a few game studios. I’d love to let everyone know that I’m now a full time artist working at EA on the new skate game. I’d just like to thank the Counter-Strike community for so kindly welcoming this level, and my other work for CSGO. I wouldn’t have gotten to where I am now without the help of the rest of the CS community. Thank you so much for all the love!!!
de_prime looks amazing. It reminds me greatly of Portal 2 due to all the foliage and torn environment.
imagine a map based on Aperture Science Labs with this grown green style
i would love it!
HUUUUGE!!
skate just got way cooler
EA is going to ruin skate 4 RIP making it an online game
this map is so detailed even the bitrate can't handle it
just wait until 4k is done processing
@@GageHeibeck I'm still waiting lol. It will blown up my 1080p monitor.
@@rnt__ Yui?
@@pardolagames8994 Yui!!!!!
looks perfectly fine to me
to be honest, this is probably the most beautiful map I've seen in source. I don't care about how it'd play or any issues with how it interacts with certain gameplay mechanics. this is an incredible work of art.
You should take a look at the game Black Mesa. Especially Xen
the power of baked lighting. i love it
@@LeDerpLegend Black Mesa's Zen is very beautiful, I agree, but it isn't meant to be realistic. this map has gone for a realistic look and it looks fantastic
@@thennoth2860 Check out the upcoming Portal 2: Desolation mod, it's mindblowing
Check out the game INFRA, it's one of the most beautiful Source games.
5:53 I've watched far too many 3kliksphilip videos for anyone to convince me that this wasn't intentionally pronounced "Morbs."
sus amorbus
I KNEW IT
Literally paused the video right there and went into comments with ctrl+f "morb"
i glad i wasnt the only one
@@awsomebot1 Same here
I find it really interesting how "Pushing source to it's limits" usually means using Environment modeling techniques that have existed for years. Like I used to do a lot of amatuer mapping in Portal 1&2 and hl2 maps.... Now I have a few Mini campaigns in HL:A , But seeing these creative individuals Brut force an Aging engine to look better is so impressive. When I got a taste of Unity,UE and S2 it was so easy to see that with a Fraction of the effort you could make something that out shined Source mapping. To me it's like when modern artists Choose to oil paint, Purposefully choosing to use a technique used in the 7th century. Source can look gorgeous even today, but Imagine if they WEREN'T hindered by these tools they choose to use? Much love and deep respect to the Mappers if you're here!!! ❤️👌
🥰
@@celeryslice hey, you're the guy!!
oil painting is not the best comparison, but I'd say it's the difference between Gioto and Faber-Castell
yeah but its more of a ignoracne is bliss situation since you dont have to worry about draw calls, overdraw and dont have to Setup 30 different materials
its*
Really interesting to see that this map was partly a predecessor to CS2s art style, soft ambient occlusion and exaggerated global illumination with really shiny and bumpy surfaces, only thing that’s missing is really bright and vivid contrast.
It was surprising to me too! Whether it was coincidence or not, I think I at least was able to capture the spirit of Counter-Strike's visual style while still pushing it in new ways.
This feels like a map made for CS2 now. I hope it gets ported.
Revisiting it in Source 2 will truly be mindbending
As someone who is a friend of Wills I am constantly impressed by the amount of effort they put into their creations. When you talk to them they seem like a playful every day normal mapper. They seem nice and somewhat knowledgeable and never brag about their own skill. Hell I didn't even find out that Hive was their map till one night we we're playing on the map and i asked "damn this is so cool i wonder who made this." lol
❤️
how did that full convo end up going haha
@@BannedProbably eh I just said I had made some of the models and textures for it and that was about it lmao
I bet you said "Nah, no way you made this."
@@DiggerDeeper01 I have a “map coin” for hive as a pin on my CSGO account plus there’s an Easter egg with my name in the map so it wasn’t that hard to believe I think lol
3kliks, this video was incredible. This new style of voice narrating is great and energetic, the editing is great and understandable, and it oozes passion for the subject. Glad to still be seeing improvements so many years later!
Also, what a cool fucking map, I'm gonna download it for some wallpapers!
same here! the pacing, the editing and the narration was just top-notch classic philip ;)
@@h4lley_c0met hi
@@vaece_ omg this made my day. I love u
@@h4lley_c0met
@@vaece_ lets play together sometime in the next weeks. k?
This map looks beautiful! It's crazy how a 17 year old engine can achieve something like this.
Titanfall.
@@KarlKognition Good point, but it is a heavily modified version of Source.
@@KarlKognition Titanfall's build to Source is what Gldsrc is to Quake.
thing is, (as explained) it isnt. It heavily relies on baking PBR textures and materials down to sources ugly and relatively bad glossiness specular non pbr mess of a workflow. the only thing the source engine is doing is giving rough lighting information and information about transparency and reflection. source does raytracing when compiling a map. but modern tools are so much more efficient and realistic than this ancient game engine.
More like Will is able to achive something like this despite engine limitations :D
What a genuine way of selflessly promoting a hard-working university student. Getting them some deserved exposure for their skills and knowledge. Kudos to you too Philip!
❤️
@@celeryslice Oh hey celery! If I may ask, are you in university for game art/art stuff or some other unrelated stuff ?
@@C_Kava Hi! I'm in community college atm for an Associate's in Arts, and currently looking for a full-time job at a AAA studio, which I plan to then transfer and take 1-2 classes a semester to get a Bachelor's degree in game art.
In terms of game art, I started really about two years ago from 0 skill taught myself.
@@celeryslice Keep up the great work dude! It really is amazing when you take a step back to see how far you've come and educated yourself doing what you like. As another college student working my way into game design, mad respect to you sir! Your work is very inspiring.
This should make comeback for cs2
Your efforts in pronouncing Wolfenstein have not gone unnoticed - also great video overall, thanks for all the pretty footage, technical details and giving insights from the mappers themselves.
When I heard Phil say it I instantly had to check who commended him on it in the comment section.
Fully agreeing with this comment!
The Wolfenstein bit caught me off-guard too, most people seem to pronounce it "Woofensteen"!
@@Gurimoe i also expanded all comments and ctrl+f'd for this, but didn't find a comment mentionning it, so i had to write it myself
True. Now only getting the O sound right and things are perfect.
It's based of him, the way Wolfenstein and Einstein get pronounced in english is bothersome.
Can't wait for Source 2 port. If it comes, of course
I really hope they will be able to pull off this kind of fidelity for all of their upcoming maps in source 2! Shouldn't be too hard considering the new tools they are given nowadays.
3:48 Here's a little unknown fun fact about this generator model, it's an early prototype model recycled from Half-Life 2's beta.
Counter-Strike: Source tends to recycle a lot of old Half-Life 2 assets, such as the hostages using older versions of the citizen face maps, and one of the hostages even reuses the head of a cut scientist character Dr. Cohrt.
You also watch radhaz
Right niko
now imagine pushing source 2 to its limits
I really missed this type of video. Thanks to the mappers and to you for presenting it.
I've been making games and mods since before quake and honestly this video makes me quite melancholy. I've gotten older and the industry has seemingly passed me by. Stuff that used to be so intricate and complex but yet highly optimized to fit on a standard CD ROM was an absolute wonder... but now with the endless means of hardware headroom I feel like I've lost touch with what this is all about because honestly the limitations truly defined my works and what I was trying to accomplish. I've been hesitant for decades to opt into newer, alternative, engines and I just feel like I've missed the opportunity all together. I'm easily capable of creating maps like this, but I just don't understand the point of it all anymore.
@@3kliksphilip philip was this written by an ai?
@@mewingrat I doubt it, “AHH” is not how an AI would speak, probably. It has grammar mistakes as well.
The point has indeed shifted. But you don't have to change with it if you don't want to. There is still room for more retro-games and mods in between all the shiny surfaces. Games such as "papers please", "among us" and "minecraft looks like crap but sold millions, simply because they played well and filled voids. In fact, they would have sold less if they required a 2060RTX to run.
Bit of a rant here, but there is no wrong choice. You can either just do what you know, or keep up with the never ending change. Old school car mechanics can't fix new cars, but they're still needed. It's the same everywhere. And if you are capable of creating good, small games I would say you are even at an advantage. There are a lot of games out there, but many are just copies of the same shiny turd.
@@flawmore No secrets here, but I would also say that there are new mechanics who cannot fix old machines. There are old systems written in languages for which the original programmers have died, and any left are able to charge a substantial premium; if they haven't already tendered their resignation and retired.
@@ButterfatFarms Old games: ever heard of Retro Gaming? UK Police are still using a computer system from 1972. FORTRAN and COBOL programmers are rare and expensive.
4:36 Watching without subtitles, when I heard this I thought to my self that surely Philip has capitalized the W... turned on subs, and sure enough.
basalt was such a good map man I'm sad they took it out of the rotation
Engage was miles more fun than basalt. Having to play basalt for operation challenges was torture
They took it out because it's dog shit.
"A convincing looking sky morbs into existence"
PHILIP
Very fascinating map! Thanks for covering these sorts of things!
I really want to play this map myself just to feel how un-source it is. Just from visuals alone, it's stunning. The cracks and fractures in concrete, the wear and tear of pathways and walls, it all looks fantastic.
The worth of a medium is not determined by its limitations, but by what is achieved despite them.
Great, good-looking map. Congratulations on the job / career opportunity, you deserve Celery!
Thanks!
Easily the most beautiful Source map I've ever seen. It's incredible that there are people out there skilled enough to create a map like this in an engine as old and limiting as Source, or even at all.
I know it's huge and probably a massive pain to alter but it's such a good tech demo for source I don't know how valve could resist.
Celery is a very talented artist! Prime will be fire! 🔥
I'm love the commitment to the ongoing "helluva lot/hell of a lot" bit
me too
Congratulations on hitting a million subscribers! I’ve been watching you since you had 300k on your main channel and I truly appreciate all the good content you brought to this community. Lots of love
It looks amazing, glad you covered this Philip
I was about to comment on how Will's map felt like what Respawn had done with Titanfall (gritty maps using a heavily adapted version of Source) until you mentioned Will had based the map on Titanfall itself
Hard to believe this was made in an engine from 2004. On ya, Will!
🥰
This map is breathtaking. 3 times during my watch of this video did I almost have a heart attack because of:
1- The amount of detail on a skybox that is covered in clouds and fog
2- The amount of props that cover the map
3- The amount of WORK that went into each prop, basically making the entire map outside of source then porting it in
Unfathomable.
🥰🥰
I used to be really involved with the mapping community. I remember I ran a server that Celery used to be a member of. I love seeing these old names pop up in your videos. I only ever made one map but it was nothing special.
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I'm so excited you're covering this map! :D
I am working on shrinking the audio portion of the map as we are reducing the overall file size of the map a bit. I am also referencing your video on reverb in cs:go to see which reverbs would be nice for each space. I can't wait to see people play this map! Will has been living and breathing this thing for so long now, and when he says a year, that's counting the entire 24 hours of each day. He is a madman.
Objects casting sharp shadows during overcast weather is my long time problem with videogames. I love cloudy days precisely because shadows are soft and blurry. Videogames can do it right simply by, say, rendering shadows in lower resolution and applying a bit of blur, yet many still don't.
Looks amazing, I can't even imagine the effort even one of the porting techniques would take. (and always nice to hear they/them used properly, thanks kliks ❤️)
As someone who is has been learning all facets of game development for the past 3 years and have learned quite a bit about how levels and graphical content for games are created, I have a deep appreciation for people like WIll who take dated engines like Source to their limits to create masterpieces like these. I don't even play CS:GO anymore but would happily take a stroll to explore the map just to look at all the work put into it. PBR has become such a massive part of modern game development and does so much for prop and level artists that sometimes I forget older engines like Source don't support it. I struggle to imagine the countless hours poured into reproducing the effects PBR offers manually. Source 2 can't come soon enough for games like CS:GO and even Dota.
Dota 2 is on source engine 2....
Hi!!! Thank you so much! I authored all my assets in PBR and then tried to tune the Source shaders as best I could to mimic it. Not much control, especially on masking reflections in areas that should be shadowed, so a lot of it needed to be subdued :(
Just imagine the kind of maps we'd get if we actually got Source 2
BETTER DUST 2!
@@ROBST3RR dust2 is a map for CSGO, which runs on Source 1. The rumors of it being created in S2 Hammer are verifiably false.
@@ROBST3RR that's not how the Source works
@@ROBST3RR Yes, they have backported portions of Source 2 to Source 1. This means that stuff like the UI and audio engine have been adapted from Source 2 code to work in CSGO. This does not mean that a map can be made in Source 2 Hammer (Hammer 5) and ported to CSGO; at best, individual models can be created and baked in Hammer 5, then imported to a CSGO map (which is likely what's going on). Stuff like brushes or displacements just don't really exist in Source 2 the way they they do in Source 1 (there are analogs, but they work completely differently).
Source 2 will never be released.
huge bo3 redwood vibes in the outside section, indoors is where i really feel the titanfall vibes
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I remember first watching your videos over a decade ago now to make maps for myself in Garry's Mod. I kept on making maps for personal projects up to SFM, once thinking "if a map were made with all props, it wouldn't have those mushy shadows that brushes have. It would be like a scene built in SFM in an empty map." Glad to see someone has tried that out. The result is phenomenal.
This is a beautiful map. I wonder what these guys could do if they were working with source 2 instead.
This is kinda making me reconsider my life choices as this is stuff we have done at my job for the past 6 years. Never thought to try to port the lessons learned into Counter Strike. Pretty much everything minus Displacements is stuff I'm familiar with. Also fun fact the bus depot HDR image at 7:49 is used in Designer, and is also the default skybox for the Operators screen on Rainbow Six Siege.
What is your job?
@@steveskeletonneii6336 3D Artist for a simulation company. We pretty much make computer games involving electrical boxes and wire circuits that teach electricians how to not electrocute themselves. My art director was a fan of hiw game studios do 3D art so we've followed that type of workflow
i love your fly by over a map taking cool angles and details, this map is really impressive.
I like when maps are not a cube with brightness to the max so the competitive player base dont cry
If CS:GO ever gets that Source 2 treatment, I'm sure as hell gonna miss all these crazy well-detailed maps that just do their best to use tricks to make a map for a 2004 engine look truly astonishing.
Source 1 might be visually dated, old, janky and awful to work with nowadays but the fact we could create stuff ranging from maps, animations, amateur mods, fully fledged games and more cool stuff that it just makes it impossible for me to NOT admire it for all those years it stayed with us since release of Counter-Strike: Source and Half-Life 2.
I don't think we'll miss out on such maps. There are millions of people playing cs and probably thousands of mappers, there are so many creative people out there who would want to go even beyond the limitations of source 2
Your wish has been answered
Hopefully the Source 2 port comes sooner than later, the engine is being pushed to its limits and the old Source workflow just ain't cutting it.
I think csgo might not get ported to source 2 for a while longer considering all the clickbait on youtube, we have no real info
@@fitmotheyap beside that, porting it to Source 2 would require users to buying a new PC because of system requirements (mostly for those who have a old PC back in early 2010s), not only that, it would break tons of (Source 1) workshop mods/addons/etc... that was unconverted to S2, such as very old one that wasn't been updated a long time while also having the developer inactive for long time.
The developer inactive thing may be solved by another modder by decomplie the map but however, doing with something like 100.000+ maps or more would take times, and so with porting them to S2.
Congrats to the guy/guys who made this map, it also got added
Thank you for the great content over the years mr Philip
It is incredible how much time and effort some CS:GO creators put in their work. And I don't mean just map creators. I mean video content creators like 3kliksphilip that are digging deep into the process of creation, bringing a new angle most of us don't have access to, map creators that are trying to bump up the level design game in a CS:GO that is old and limited by an outdated engine, skin designers that are trying to create different styles of gun skins and so on. The respect I have for those people is enormous and I am so happy when I see that somebody is chasing their passion, even if that passion it is not necessarily very profitable.
5:53 "A convincing looking sky MORBS into existence"
I was so zen listening to Kitten's background ambient sounds next to Philip's music. Incredible work by Will to get astounding breathtaking visuals, huge props to them for pushing through, and using the best (imo) AA method for foliage 😏
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in my early days of map making (back in 2001--yes that i'm old) 1% of my map consisted of props, but back then they were referred to as 'prefabs'. the rest were just models so a lot of the time if i wanted a custom prop on the spot, like a chair or something, i had to model it myself. i hardly relied on pre-frabricated models that was already provided in the half-life valve hammer editor.
2001 dam letsgo
as a 3d artist, man, this is such an enjoyable explanation.
I’m so glad!! I helped to make sure it was an accurate as explanation as it could be, and 3kliks helped to make it approachable! :)
Your videos made me appreciate CSGO maps so much more. The amount of passion, effort, and skill involved is amazing.
Prodigy!!!!
DAMN, where do you even start adding that much detail?!
I think that the Titanfall inspiration also had been a motivator of how the Source engine can look. I think people forget that Titanfall and Apex Legends runs on Source
you are correct but it a highly tweaked Source engine like Source is to the quake engine
They don't run on source, they run on an engine that was based on source. It's like saying Half Life runs on the quake engine.
@@robot6346 Goldsource is basically quake
@@teslashark it is very different underneat. just because there are parts that are similar to eachother it doesn't measn they're the same engine.
@@pinkmail6841 And Source 2012 is highly tweaked compared to 2004. And they tweaked in some more in 2015 when Newke came out. They just haven't put quite as much work into it as Respawn did because there was always this nagging sense of "Why put in the effort when we're already working on a way better engine... it'll be ready any day now... any day now..."
wonder what this map would look like on the new source engine :D
Thank you for always adding subtitles.
Great video man, I still remember the first videos of yours i watched were source sdk mapping tutorials!
these trees look so good it's crazy
Not surprising that's this map is this pretty, seeing as how Titanfall 2 runs on a super modified Sauce engine.
I mean, the Respawn engine has rewritten just about everything - it's hard to compare two engines that don't even share similar renderers.
This is awesome! I've been learning model creation and a lot of this is very relevant. Particularly in older games, baking in lighting to the texture itself through things like ambient occlusion or on the model with vertex colours can really help to create more authentic light when it can't be shown by the game's lighting engine.
The music choice is great in this video! Love it!
5:51 did... did he just say.. MORB!?
Working in spite of the limitation and issues allows for such creativity to flourish. Same as many games done on hardware that had no business being able to run such impressive games.
Granted some minor silly issues like smokes breaking and not working correctly with the models in the map should be fixed. But seeing such creativity and detail in more drawn non PBR style is very refreshing and nice to see.
I dont like PBR in most cases i seen, tho these cases were mostly awful like Warcraft 3 Reforged which by its destruction of og Wc3 ruined both word 'reforge/reforged' and some of technologies for me like PBR because of its disgusting and unnecessary implementation in something that should be down to earth, faithful remaster, but is anything but such.
It’s super easy to make stylized art/materials in physically based renderers though. It’s just up to what the people using it want to make. Essentially exactly what was just shown in this video lol. They defied pretty much all Source conventions and expectations to create this map, just like you can defy PBR guidelines to make something less “real.”
I’d argue that the biggest problem people have with PBR rendering doesn’t have anything to do with the tech itself, but rather the software used in that more modern workflow -mainly Substance Painter. It’s very easy to use the default grunge maps and edge wear/dirt generators to create something that looks fairly good, but also very samey and distinctly “PBR” looking. The software pushes you towards a particular art style that isn’t totally suited for every project.
Of course, the same could be said for traditional non-PBR rendering, back when artists made heavy use of AO maps straight from Xnormal and photosourced textures mashed together in Photoshop. Ultimately, an artist’s toolbox goes a long way towards defining their style, and it’s important to be conscious of that particularly when trying to emulate a art created in a earlier era, using a different set of tools.
This map is simply gorgeous! Holy hell!
Not gonna lie, a little disappointed we didnt get your "sorse" joke with the spilling bottle
Source & Unreal are engines that will always amaze me & ill never shy away from.
I can already feel the FPS dipping
That poligob count
Looks very beautiful but it's obvious source isn't made for that sort of thing. It's just impossible to optimize such maps on source.
Phill, just want to take time to say thank you for putting the effort into your closed captioning in your vids
Looks awesome, can't wait to play it.
Always grateful that you put subtitles for us.
Do you do it manually or some other method??
@@3kliksphilip ohh, thanks for response
Agreed, for non english speakers his subtitles are a huge help
I like subtitles for the little chance he hides some Easter Egg or cut lines in them.
It reminds me of Alyx.
Most beautiful game I've ever seen not because of sheer graphics but because of the meticulous detail.
Amazing! Really looking forward to what map makers will be able to do once Source 2 releases. Hopefully it eases their work a ton.
This is insane, amazing effort
It's so crazy how different our views are. I'm born in 05, so I grew up playing mw2 with my brother and Crysis etc. So I'm fostered in too a higher quality of graphics. So when i play cs, pubg etc i always use the lowest possible settings and stretched, because I think it's over rated with pretty colors and high textures. compared too you that have followed the whole development of graphics and seem to get excited by every little foward step hih. sorry for the long comment, just wanted too share:)
need a port of this to source 2 O_O
Man, that's gotta be one of the most beautiful and detailed CS:GO maps I've seen. I'm a sucker for those swaying trees. Really love the aesthetic as well, having derelict buildings in a forest, kinda reminds me of something like Half life 2 episode 2.
Its fine to say - Will did an AWESOME job. His work started great and every new work becoming more and more a big thing.
Just goes to show that art direction is always going to triumph over fancier new graphics. You can have the most up to date polished renderer there is and still have a map look like garbage because you smear fog and bloom everywhere and have no care for the aesthetic.
This *is* 99% 'fancy new graphics' though, just done elsewhere and baked for the engine beforehand.
@@AlphaGarg That's not new or fancy, even GoldSource used baked raytraced lighting lol. What I mean is the actual renderer, here there's no PBR, no true volumetrics, no real time specular reflections or realtime shadowed point lamps, etc. nothing like you might see in newer engines. The point is those don't make a better looking game on their own.
@@Jofoyo ... well, no, most textures for GoldSrc props (like the ones in Decay, Condition Zero, or Paranoia) were either digitally painted by an artist or photobashed.
Perhaps I should've been clearer instead of assuming you watched the whole video. I'm not talking about VRAD, I'm talking about the use of external tools, in this map's case Substance Designer and Substance Painter. Meaning there is (rather, was) PBR, just not in real time, as it was all baked onto the textures beforehand by the artist. I'd say that's fairly fancy technology, especially considering the GPU requirements for Substance Painter.
Also, there very clearly are specular reflections all over this map. Philip even made a point of showing it, since that's the sort of stuff the map creators were teasing him with before giving him access to a version of the map itself.
In the end, though, I do agree that style beats tech. It's why games like Portal 2 and Left 4 Dead 1 and 2 age so much better than some of their contemporaries like Gears of War and Skyrim. It's just that, in this case, most of that style was only possible thanks to tech that I'd personally call fairly modern.
@@AlphaGarg I'm very aware of their use of Substance and it's demands which aren't as bad as you make it out to be, I used to use it on my shitty GTX 750, it was just slower and struggled with 4k textures. And I did watch the full video.
But what I am talking about is real time specularity with shadowing and clear parallax, and such shading on all surfaces, the entire point of my initial comment is we don't need full real-time lighting, and GI, and everything else that people keep praising as a magic bullet, for something to look good. That is what I mean by fancy and new graphics, I'm sorry my definition of the word confused you. I'm talking about actual render fidelity, not texture trickery.
My vrad comparison is just that, a comparison, it's similar to what they're doing, just on models, baking their own lighting and AO into the mesh textures. Something plenty of games have done in the past. Philip even compares the fidelity of the map to id tech 5 iirc, from 2010. All of this has been possible for at least a decade. But even then they had better lighting and shaders than what source has.
@@Jofoyo Yes. Except that, again, it does have specular lighting. But yes.
I also thought baking light on the textures could tickle the best out of a csgo map.
But could we get even further? Is it possible to implement animated models like water fluid?
I thought about to build a map with a breaking dam when the bomb explodes where the breaking dam is a baked animation.
How far can the source engine go? All I know of animated models are the fan in inferno and the heli rotors in several other maps.
If you played Half Life Ep 2, I think there's the bridge scene in the beginning that nicely collapses that I think uses it's own animations.
And I also think the End Of The Line Train scene where it flies and destroys the building into a bunch of chunks is also some what a separate animation?
Dunno if those types are what you're referring to?
@@RickTheSmugLord Yes you are right. But I think the bridge is animated only partially. There are bending rails but the rest looks like its just a lot of single models that fall apart. But even the bending rails are a big thing. Do you mean the exploding citadel in episode 1?
I don't see why it couldn't be done. Team Fortress 2 uses those.
Bread Space comes to mind, albeit a smaller scale than a dam breaking.
Something that massive could still be done, however. Just needs a lot of time.
You could use baked animations yeah. There was plenty of "cinematic physics" in ep2, and tf2 has baked explosion animations in some payload maps.
Valve-made TF2 payload maps like Goldrush, Badwater and Thunder Mountain use bespoke baked physics animations for their finale explosions.
You can really see the Titanfall 2 influence in full effect, I love it so much
I love the subtle shadows, it fits the art style of the map and it leaves less work to be done on lights and shadows.
5:52 A CONVINCING LOOKING SKY M O R B S
It's morbin time
holy sh1t imagine this in cs2
I've probably logged 10k+ hours in Hammer over the years, and I'm still fucking floored by how good an engine release in 2004 can be made to look in 2022.
Cheers! 🥰
Nice video Philip! It was great to see a more technical video about the source engine and the work mappers have to do to make their models look good in cs go. I think this sort of applies to skin making as well, as you often see skins with custom light data baked in to them even when using normal maps. For the extra detail/looks
Also good luck with particle effects and smoke grenades, that already sounds painful to do outside of source :p
Size in MB: 800
In-game FPS: 8
PC: Dust
@@hoterbran Hotel: Trivago
@@hoterbran Dust: 2
Directx9 the great cause of this, i can't wait for source2 to bring directx 11 and finally throw dx9 to the void
It took me most of the video to figure out who the other person in "they" was. Gotta love 2022.
this might be my new favorite map, feels close to home
This is incredibly impressive. I'm always fascinated with the CSGO mapping scene's focus on creating lots of bespoke assets for maps - there's some people in the TF2 mapping scene who take that approach, but by and large most people are interested in smart reuse of existing assets. This is an approach I'd personally never enjoy doing, but I'm glad to see other people pushing what's possible in this archaic engine.
It makes sense to do a lot of sharing for TF2, especially since when most of the assets for that game are purely diffuse and maybe have a normal map. When I was working on Prime, I wanted to emphasize material responses, lighting, and making the most out of Source’s shaders. Since most assets available for Source do not make best use of the engine, creating assets from scratch was the best way to achieve a polished and cohesive aesthetic.
celery the goat
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FranzJ map when?
What?
still looks dated but impressive still
This is very interesting to talk about, super hyped to see the future of Valve in general! All of this just keeps making me thing of an Orange Box 2 even more.
This map reminds me of those 3D rendered frag-movies with special effects where the clips take place on a more detailed version of the map.
I want this on cs2