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The Rise Of Counter-Strike
b0r1s writes "Business 2.0 is running a story about Minh Le, and his now famous Counter-Strike mod for Half Life. The article explains the origins and motivation for the development of the mod, as well as explains the virtues of making code freely available for those who wish to hack games."
Um, actually as of a year or two ago Valve owns all the rights to counter-strike and are putting lots of $$ into it's continuing development. (The exact date of aquisition was just before CS hit version 1.0)
Valve knows that the only reason they are still selling half-life is CS and other such MODS. Half-Life was a great game but it says a lot about the engine if it is this flexible to still be in use for a continual mod making community.
Before counterstrike, he was best known for a little quake2 mod known as ActionQuake2, a mod that makes q2 play more like an action movie. great fun if you can find some active servers. There was eventually an ActionHalfLife, but as far as i know he didnt take part in the development of it.
Pain lasts, kid. Its how you know you're alive. Sometimes I think this growing up thing is just pain management-TheMaxx
I wouldn't say this is the case. One of the biggest reasons for Counter-Strike's success is the fact that it's based on an old game. There are a few major reasons for this:
1) Half-Life was a great game in its own right. It was also one of the best selling FPS games ever. As such, most PC gamers already owned everything they needed to start playing once CS came out. This is the power of a good mod being in the right place at the right time, and it is not to be overlooked. UT2K3 is supposed to be a dream to mod for. Much more so than Half-Life was. Be on the lookout there.
2) Many people have been playing CS for quite a long time, and as such have gotten very good at it. Most of these people hate the idea of trading in all their skills to begin again as a newbie in one of the "pretty" new games. This is a bigger sticking point than you might think. Also, ladders and leagues have fairly complex rulesets that have been tweaked to create the best possible competitive experience. Doing this with a new game is not easy and takes time.
3) Half-Life is based on Quake technology and has years of development behind it. The game is rock-solid stable. The few bugs in the engine (physics, etc) are well known and compensated for automatically by decent players. Contast this with something like Battlefield: 1942 or UT2K3. They'll get to the same level, but by then they'll be old.
4) The development tools are mature and there are plenty of map makers, coders, modelers and skinners that know how to use them. CS has some great maps, and to my knowledge pretty much every one of them has come from an unpaid third party mapper. The tools these guys use can be quite complex, and learning them for a new engine can be quite difficult. Not only that, but once you know how to use them, you need to spend a lot of additional time finding out what "works" with the gameplay. This is non-trivial and so these guys tend to stick with a game as long as they can, moving on to a new one only when they're fairly sure it's good enough to ride for a while in the future.
5) Most importantly, pretty means very little to gamers. Sure, they like to gawk at pretty pictures as much as the next guy, but they're not going to give up a great game just because something comes along that's prettier. You can still find a few raging NetQuake battles out there if you want. Why? The game rocks. Also, just because the hardcore among us (myself included) just must have the latest and greatest hardware doesn't mean all of us are that way. I constantly hear people in CS games complaining about how slow the game is on their P2-300/TNT. How do you think these people would fair trying to play RTCW? I get a little pissed at the framerates on that game myself, and I have an Athlon XP and a GeForce4.
Game... blouses.
NOLF2 and DooM III are single-player games. Counter-Strike: "Blue Zone" doesn't exist. I think you mean "Condition Zero," which is also a single-player game.
At the time of this post, CS has 85320 players (source). Medal of Honor: AA is in second place. With less than a tenth of the players that CS has.
Recent server data shows that this shift is reflected across most servers, as Counterstrike population is decreasing, RTCW is up a little, and MOH:AA is up dramatically.
You're probably not lying, you're just totally ignorant. I've been following HL for ever (see my site), and today is the first time I've seen the game break 100,000 players largely due to CS.
You can use your anecdotal evidence all you won't, but there is no "shift across most servers." You are absolutely wrong, I'm sorry.
There is a mod for Quake3 on beta stage called navy seals. It plays and feels very similar to counter strike, except the engine (Q3) is better.
And they have a Linux version.
I have played it and it is rock solid and good fun.
You can find it here:
Navy seals: covert operations
When his defense asked, "Which computer has Jon Johansen trespassed upon?" the answer was: "His own."
I stopped playing HL because too few servers which were fast for me used anti-cheat software, and too many of the players are chumps. Tacops seems to have a better breed of player for the most part (Obviously some CS players are great people) and I just enjoy the gameplay more as well.
If you have UT, check it out.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
It's impossible to 'fix' cheating. John Carmack had a great .plan on the subject where he broke it down to a choice between how much network latency matters and how much cheating will be possible.
The only way to be completely cheat-free is to turn the client hardware into a dumb terminal. At that point the only cheats possible are things like turning the brightness up on your monitor. But this means that the entire game has to be simulated on the server, including the graphics. If you send polygons down the wire, a malicious client can analyze the polygones and provide visual cues to the user.
When Valve released the "network patch" for Counter Strike, they introduced client-side prediction like that found in QuakeWorld, and that meant that the client software got to decide whether a hit was accurate or not, and where it landed. They did this because they wanted the game to be responsive for modem users who might have latency spikes as high as 200ms. This makes the instantaneous frame-rate of the game about 5fps. Client-side prediction assumes everything carries on as it was before when the latency is too high, and then re-sync when latency returns to normal. The actual result was that proxies could manipulate the network traffic to give the user perfect aim and perfect knowledge, and sometimes the ability to shoot through obstacles.
As someone else mentioned, the solution is not technical, it's social. Have LAN parties, or use some form of distributed trust to restrict cheating at the personal level. Refuse to play with anyone who has a poor rating. This is an imperfect solution, like SlashDot moderation, but it's a lot more feasable and efficient than technical solutions.