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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."
According to the article, Valve bought the rights to CS. If there's a lawsuit, it's probably because the original author is working on a second mod - and valve is concerned that he's using some of the code he had already sold.
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.
Most of my gaming friends have moved on to more technologically advanced games such as Medal of Honor: Allied Assault or Return to Castle Wolfenstein from Counterstrike. 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.
The new Counter-strike:Blue Zone may help increase the number of gamers, but only in the short term as games such as No One Lives Forever 2, the new RTCW expansion pack, and the much-anticipated Doom III come out.
So, don't look for much more success stories like Counterstrike, because the technological fickleness of gamers will cause mods based on old engines to become unpopular quickly.
"But his main goal has been accomplished. In the two and half years since he left college, he hasn't set foot in a cubicle."
BUT, he still lives in his parents basement. That Valve buyout must not have been anywhere near the $5,000,000 figure.
The majority of players are annoying 12 year olds. At least, that's how they behave. And of course there's always the everpresent cheat/aimbot/wallhack (l)users. Online games are fun for the first month or so after release. Then when the hackers get up to speed or the kiddies find out about the latest game, it all goes to hell.
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
Wow, it's amazing that halflife was so open to let their fans freely modify their code and give them all the tools to do it. This flies directly in the face of corporate logic, where companies sick their lawyers on their most loyal fans for copyright infringement or DMCA violations for modifying their products. And how did their fans react?
"We've actually sold more of the overall Half-Life family of products each year since we shipped back in 1998, which is very unusual in a market typified by three-month shelf lives"
It really is in corporate best interests to let their fans run with their products, create communities around their products and thereby add value and promote their products for them. I wish they'd understand that the fastest way to kill the very communities that support them is to send lawyers after them.
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I almost flunked out of college because of you ;)
Thanks for a great game and many wasted hours.
There is not that much code to counterstrike. 95% of the size of the cs mod download is textures and graphics. Very little of it is code. From what I understand the new version of Counterstrike(counter-strike:condition zero) is being developed by valve in conjunction with the creator of CS.
agreed, but the theme of this article seems to be that opening games for mod development is a great bonus, which is surely something to encourage, seeing as it lets people (us?) get more playtime out of the same games. cs became popular, IMHO, because it let people download the mod for free and use a game that was already vastly popular, in a completely different way.
Personally, I know he's not out to create a fun game and uphold ideals of sharing code and such. I mean, have you played Counter-Strike?
He's out to conquer the world, and with each new person who plays, it's one less person who can operate normally in life. I mean, I started playing CS 3 years ago, and while I havn't died of any marathon sessions, I've come awfully close.
Sounds like a bad Pinky and the Brain episode, but... it's too scary not to consider.
Not needing the game CD stuck in my box is what sucked me in. I could play half-life, UT, and a few other games, but most would require the CD to be in the box. CS did not. I could jump in, it checked my CD key over the net, and I was off getting pasted by people who were way better than I.
After scratching a couple CD's and having oodles of hard drive space, I just don't like to play games that require the media. Granted, I can wander and get the no-cd 'fix' for the game, but you end up looking for a fresh crack every time the game does a service pack. As someone who actually pays for the bloody game - this pisses me off.
I'd say no media 'copy protection' was key for me...
+++ UGUCAUCGUAUUUCU
Economist Article: Counter-culture
I'm not sure if anyone's heard, Oprah Winfrey had an 'expert' on the other day, who tied the recent sniper killings in the D.C. area to Counter Strike. The 'expert' said that Counter Strike had trained this individual to kill and how to handle a gun.
;)
Excuse me, but how does playing a game teach you how to properly handle a gun? I've told my friends that Counter Strike isnt a game, it's a simulator. But a gun simulator it is not. I view it as a very good tactical simulator. But no-where during its gameplay does it teach you how to properly handle a gun, let alone teach you how to shoot someone at great distances.
I guess I just needed to get that off my chest. Oprah Winfrey is ugly too.
*DrugCheese rants*
This is pretty much stating what we already know. What it does not touch upon however is that Valve seems unwilling to leave CS (or HL alone). Now, do not get me wrong, Valve has been a great developer, especially when it comes to mod makers; very few companies have done what they have done with their mod community. Nonetheless, its growing irritating to constantly hear about all this updates and new versions of CS when the company's original new flagship product has seemed to dissappear. The product I speak of is Team Fortress 2, which was supposed to come out a while back, but has all but dissappeared off the planet. Everyonce in a while you might hear a slight peep from Valve with the letters TF2 in them, but its next to nothing ('We are working on it'). CS is good, I still play it, but it is definitely time for something new. They should continue supporting HL, but in a much more limited way, and start moving towards a point release patch. Riding on the success of the last game you made 4 years ago gets a little old after a while. I do not mean this literally, but its annoying that they talked about TF2 like it was going to revolutionize (yea, its hype, but hey, it looked cool) multiplayer FPS games, but now all they're giving us is addons to Half-Life, which as I said is 4 years old, going on 5. This is all pretty much hopeless since CS still kills all other multiplayer fps games in terms of pure amounts of players & servers; where there is a demand, the publishers will go. I hope this isn't the result of Sierra's pressure, but from the attitudes of the Valve dev team that does not seem to be so.
"What can a thoughtful man hope for mankind on Earth, given the experience of the past million years? Nothing." -Bokonon
Actually he is working (I believe exclusively at this point) on a second mod. A follow-up to Counter-Strike for Valve's next game.
He is, to my knowledge, on their payroll. As such, I'd say he's fairly unlikely to to be the subject of a lawsuit of any kind from Valve or Sierra (the game's publisher).
Game... blouses.
Next step : Move out of your parent's house. I mean, how are you going to use that newfound fame as a hot shit game designer to get chicks if you still live in your 'rents basement?
He needs to give John Romero a call.. Romero can teach him how to get chicks, and he can teach Romero how to make a game that doesn't suck shit. If a piece of shit like Daikatana can get you Stevie Case, imagine the kind of girl writing a good game like Counter-Strike will get you.. ;)
All movements for social change begin as missions, evolve into businesses, and end up as rackets.
The #1 problem with this mod, cheating, wasn't mentioned anywhere.
This would be a bigger game if that was fixed, personally I have zero intrest in it because I constantly hear those who play bitching about cheating.
Too bad.
-- Note: If you don't agree with me, don't bother replying. I won't read it.
Ok I don't hate Counter Strike per se, it's a fine game, but I am bitter about its complete dominance in online FPSs. There are countless of very cool mods but you can't find anyone to play with because _everyone_ is playing CS. For example on several occasion I've been exited about some new and innovative Quake mod, but have been unable to find a single human player to play against. Infuriating.
My favourite memory was exploiting the map cs_siege. On this map there was a room with hostages that the CTs had to rescue. If the terrorists started losing and couldnt buy good guns, I would take all the hostages into said room. The only way into that room was a door. There was a window to that room that was unbreakable. I would spray a black spray over the window on the outside so the CTs couldnt see inside. Mind you, due to halflife mechanics, the terrors could see out of it fine, thus we had a sort of one way viewport. We would camp out there and just wait until a CT would bumble in (this first CT is usually the "rambo" who had a cable modem back before they were as common and he has a good gun and no time for teamplay). Voila, their LPB is down and we have his gun. Chances are, his gun shoots through walls and we just mow the rest down as they come into the room our window faces.
Later on, the window was made breakable and a vent was added to make another way into that room, but that was some of the funnest gaming I've ever had.
Never overestimate the end user. -jeramy b. smith
The judges have found that Valve can't sue Counter-strike because a) Counter-strike is a game, and b) it is developed by Valve.
When are you people going to learn that you can't trust someone called "Trusty"? And when are the moderators going to learn that before modding something as "informative", they should (at least) check that the information is true?
RMN
~~~
Upon further checking on http://www.gamespy.com/stats, CS is alive and well. To all the naysayers proclaiming that CS is "dead", they are not looking at the simple numbers of people playing it. As of the time of this post, there are over 92,000 people playing this game. How far does that eclipe MoH (~8,000 players), the next closest competitor?.
The numbers speak for themselves, CS is alive and well. It'll take another "CS like" game to take people away from something they like.
I'll tell you this, if Valve ported the base client to Linux, I'd say their install base for CS (and other mods) would grow even further. Being that the engine is mainly Quake2, it can't be too difficult to port. Let Valve create the linux client and the numbers for their games will grow even further.
Counter-Strike: Condition Zero is being developed by Gearbox Software (they've done various Half-Life official expansions), for the most part independent of Valve.
I believe Valve is working on another game (hopefully Team Fortress 2, yeah right) and Gooseman/Minh is working on a true CS sequel for that game.
http://www.counter-strike.net/faq.html (at the bottom) says that the actual CS team is not involved in the production of CS:CZ beyond ensuring the game stays true to the original.
Game... blouses.
So, don't look for much more success stories like Counterstrike, because the technological fickleness of gamers will cause mods based on old engines to become unpopular quickly.
On the contrary; as engines become more advanced, their lifespan will increase. And with more and more games supporting mods, chances are we'll see more and more user-created games like Counter-Strike (or Team Fortress, etc.).
One of the problems with this is that game developers prefer to release games that are complete crap "out of the box", hoping that someone will make a "killer mod" for free, and that they (the game's authors / publishers) will profit from it.
By contrast, HL is probably the most polished action game I've ever seen. Very few games released since then come even close to its balanced and addictive single-player gameplay. I hope Valve are dedicating the same amount of time to TF2's playtesting and refinement.
RMN
~~~
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."
Counter Stick?
Too many zeros, not enough ones
That being said, the people who play Counter Strike should be beaten over the head. I've never seen a more contentious, petty, jealous bunch. Anyone who is even moderately good is *obviously* cheating. God forsake someone would forsake their precious little egos and admit to themselves they lost a round legitimately. If you beat someone, it *must* have because they were doing something unscrupulous.
Worse, are the people who actually do cheat. I don't know what their deal is, but they suck even more than the people who accuse everyone *else* of cheating. Tipping the board in your favor defeats the purpose of playing. How can you say you won if you didn't win fairly? It's much more satisfying to beat the pants out of another team knowing it was just your own skill and strategy that did it, not some goddamn program you downloaded off the internet. Those people should be rounded up, put on barges and set adrift into the pacific.
For those that like CounterStrike, check out UrbanTerror. It's a TC built upon the Q3 engine, and it's quite nice.
> Valve released TFC (Team Fortress), the first well-known teamplaying mod for halflife,
Actually, TFC stands for Team Fortress Classic. Team Fortress (TF) itself was a mod for Quakeworld. Valve hired the developers of TF
> something else than deathmatch, i.e. realistic gameplay (Action Halflife mod anyone?). The Counterstrike concept came naturally then.
Actually, the first counterstrike beta's (and if anyone still remembers, the alphas too) before Action Halflife did. Action Halflife was never as popular as it's predecessor, Action Quake2 was. Coincidently, Counterstrike's creator, Gooseman, was a programmer for the A-team in their Quake2 days, which was the maker of Action Quake2 and later on (and without Gooseman), Action Half-life.
If Quake3 and UT had come out six months before, CS might have ended up being a Quake3 or (less likely) an UT mod. Gooseman was a Quake2 and a Quake1 mod maker. As he said in various interviews over the years, he moved to Halflife because it had a much nicer SDK than Quake2 did.
Of course, since he is a Valve employee now, he won't admit it, but Quake3 and UT both have much better engines and SDK's than Halflife does.
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.
But while CS gives Valve time to fiddle and tweak, in another respect it's bad for the gaming industry. The mod's amazing success discourages innovation even at the very developer whose original great innovation led, inadvertantly, to its one day being out-innovated by a fan. Meanwhile, every kid who's playing CS 24/7 isn't buying new product. Given the quality of most product out there, you can hardly blame them, but it would be nice to see something approaching the mid-to-late 90s period of game creativity; sadly, we probably won't any time soon, and CS is one reason why.
This is one reason why I will never enjoy on-line games as much as LAN games. If someone on-line is cheating, I have to wait for the admin to become convinced and boot him. If I'm at a LAN, I get vengeance by installing Sub Seven on his machine when he makes a bathroom run.
On-line games require that a player communicates with the admins. I'm an admin for the flagen.com server. When people come to us saying 'ban this person he cheats' then we usually ask the regulars before taking action. When a regular accuses someone of cheating, their opinion is held higher and their evidence is taken more into consideration than people who we've never heard of.