Play Counter-Strike 1.6 in your browser
cs-online.club
cs-online.club
The main thing shared between the two is the feel while shooting. It's hard to explain, but you feel the "weight" of the gun and it's rate of fire really well and it's satisfying when you land shots.
But, the abilities, while not overly broken, does change the feel and strategy considerably. And Valorant maps are really bad in comparison to CSGO. So much useless space, bad angles, etc.
So, while I hope Valorant pushes CS to get better, it's unlikely that the pool of players or viewers will be 1:1. The CS pros moving to Valorant are basically doing so because they either can't have a CS career (Brax, perma ban for match fixing; iBuyPower) or haven't been good enough in a while/never were good enough for a T1 CSGO team.
I think it is really early to use this as some sigil for how good the game is or how well it will do as an esport. Of course the first people to move are the ones outside of a current CS contract! Why would you give up your share of multi-million dollar prize pools while the other game is a week and a half old? it isn't necessarily an indictment of Valorant, its just the sensible business choice this early in the game.
I still played CS but mainly because of the team play it added. Simple, flexible, and enjoyable.
The Internet has been "toxic and racist" since, oh, the first chat room...
Kiddies in a game can't hurt you. Worry about the important shit, like being killed or thrown in a cage by law enforcement.
In any respectable community, those sorts of people tend to get unceremoniously ejected from the community - from IRC channels to web forums to community-run game servers of old.
Now, games are match-made and game companies are pretty much forced to exercise discretion about what kind of community they want to have playing their game. Personally, I no longer have the patience for losing 30+ minutes of my life to a game that was lost because there's a 3-stack on my team who do nothing but throw, team-kill and think they're the height of comedy because they say offensive things or have a swastika as their profile picture.
Hard to take this seriously considering they had 3 million DAU during the closed beta and it's averaging 100k+ concurrent viewers on Twitch during the day (North America).
Overwatch is much more abilities-heavy while Valorant is still more aiming heavy.
On the other hand, unless Riot deviates massively from my expectations, they will release new agents so often, and with such power creep, that it will get pretty damn abilities-heavy and approach Overwatch.
I don't understand why anyone knowledgeable would be installing a "free" game that includes a kernel level rootkit.
https://www.techspot.com/news/84841-valorant-anti-cheat-soft...
You can dislike it, you can question whether you can trust such software from a Tencent-owned company, but it doesn’t make Riot’s solution somehow different.
2. It worked for LoL, which has made something like 10x the money of Dota 2. Valorant doesn't have to be "the best" in its category, as judged by connoiseurs, to win its market.
Interesting you mention the root kit - you realise Steam monitors urls Your machine has visited right? They also didn’t confirm whether or not these are then uploaded to their servers.
You see this trend in MMOs as well - towards convenience (and fun) at the expense of community.
Back in the old days of EverQuest and Final Fantasy XI, it was almost impossible to do anything by yourself; you HAD to find other people, and ideally a clan. Enemies would destroy you after level 10 or so, and quests were incredibly laconic and abstruse seemingly by design.
Everything about the game was difficult, dangerous, and mysterious. Reaching out to others was expected, and many were glad to help you through those same challenges they too struggled with.
On the other hand, it took hours - often all night - to accomplish just about anything. Once you got a good party going, you basically didn't want to stop, as just getting to that point took two freakin' hours.
On the other other hand, because everything took forever, you would inevitably shoot the shit, because there was just nothing else to do!
Anyways, nowadays you can easily solo pretty much any modern MMO; and any group content just automatically plops you into a party with some dudes that you will quite certainly never see again. Action is immediate with little time to type anything, (there's surprisingly little support for voice chat in these games), and usually easy enough to hardly require spoken coordination.
Just gotta look for people on discord I guess.
Back in the day I remember mailing $10 every month to someone splitting hosting costs on our clan's 1.6 CS server. It felt like a clubhouse I'd pop into after school to hang out with all my online friends.
Nowadays I get the same experience from joining voice chat in my regular Discord channel with people I know, then grouping up with whoever's online for a few comp or quick play overwatch games.
I still play CS:S.
Back when PSD slicing was a thing.
Looking at the first few seconds of the first video on Steam for Pavlov (https://store.steampowered.com/app/555160/Pavlov_VR/) shows a very low-skilled encounter as well. If they are trying to attract CS players, they need to show it's a game that shows skills, not like that.
That might be the difference between having to actually aim your gun with hands in front of you, and flicking your reticle to a location with a mouse.
> unless VR suddenly gets a lot cheaper and a lot better, Pavlov will never replace CS.
Not that I think it will ever replace CS, but I think you can side-load Pavlov onto a Quest, and that's not necessarily a high cost of entry depending on what you compare it to. For a casual player, that's probably a lot of money. For people more serious about gaming, that might be equivalent to a few optional upgrades to their mouse and keyboard.
Interesting to me is that it opens up some interesting competitive options, where you could ensure people are all on equivalent equipment, if for example you have a Quest tournament.
I just played Pavlov on it and it works flawlessly, I'm not sure I get your comment.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/496240/Onward/
Onward is way better experience.
I also like Onward better, but Onward is more like a realistic military sim than a spiritual Counter Strike
Check out something like https://krunker.io/ which gives me a surprisingly good FPS experience despite my distance from the server.
Browser gaming does take some thought though, to be sure. UDP via WebRTC is relatively new and isn't trivial. And I know some games get around TCP head of queue blocking by opening up 2+ WebSockets.
Expect to get annihilated by someone who knows the movement system though. You'll know someone's using it when you see it, since they'll be moving at 999 units per second and circle strafing you to death.
A great example is the original Binding of Isaac; written in flash, but near the end everything was so precarious that backups had to be made before certain publishing stages because sometimes it would corrupt the files it was trying to build (Due to the complexity.)
AFAIK, "zero code" systems still haven't reached the level of hypercard (the spiritual predecessor to flash) when it comes to being able to define event->action with a mouse, much less expanding them to the full capabilities of flash.
https://www.marksort.com/udp-like-networking-in-the-browser/
I guess it's easier to piggyback on the security model of the P2P handshake than work out a separate model for client-server communication.
I built a pair of libraries for a nodejs<->browser DataChannel, it was a nightmare at the time though, and I'm sure totally obsolete by now.
Given how long it took for us to get %*@!$ data channels, I guess we'll get a simpler way to connect to a regular server in... 2030? (I watched WebRTC very closely from the Ericsson prototype was released... for awhile I was contemplating trying to pass data in the audio or video streams -_-)
The best thing is to design your gameplay to be "predictive", that's how we had ~300 player games like Subspace over 28.8/56k way back in the day.
It is no surprise that a TCP text-based protocol sucks for realtime gaming purposes.
How about being able to play with your friends after just handing them a link? Native 1.6 doesn't even run on my computer at all.
I think browser ports are the only hope that old games have at coming back. The other month I played Nox's quest mode with my friend on a browser emscripten port (plus a lot of custom code / networking to get it online). And it's a game I thought I'd never get to play again. Gog.com sells Nox for Windows but of course the servers are long offline.
The adolescent glee over how much worse browser applications run really misses the big picture.
This is actually one of the major selling points for Cloud Gaming. Although it still has a lot of issues to be adressed before getting into the mainstream, this is exactly what it promises. Just sending your friends an invite link and get them to sign up is a much more pleasant experience than downloading 100+GBs of game files before being able to join the session.
I also enjoy seing browser implementations of popular games. My favorite recent example is the classic version of Minecraft running in the browser [0]. The browser is obviously a much more restrictive environment than a native app, but I can still imagine plenty of useful examples for performant 3D graphics in a browser. After all, Games are often just used as a showcase for the capabilities of new Apis and performance improvements.
That doesn’t work well for games with lots of modern assets.
> Native 1.6 doesn't even run on my computer at all.
That is strange, it works on the latest Windows.
> I think browser ports are the only hope that old games have at coming back.
Why? Steam, GoG, DOSBox, Proton, DXVK, emulators, VMs, etc. all give you access to almost every game that has been produced, today.
Many of those have thriving online communities, too.
But regardless of this particular game, it is not a valid complaint. It is like complaining your phone or your toaster cannot run a given game because it was never designed for them.
> Why does HN love to rag on web technologies so much?
HN is quite pro-web and there are dozens of startups based on the web.
Nevertheless, my counter is: why does "the web" try to recreate existing technologies and operating systems?
When I was a kid I heard about a group of hippies that would have parties deep into the desert, far from roads or civilization. They had a "list", and if you were on it you'd get invited to the parties. Long story short, I figured out how to get on the list and one of the coolest things about those parties was how much effort everyone who attended went through to get there, both in however they managed to get invited and how much of a potential ordeal the journey was just to show up. The friends I made there put me on my current life course and now I'm surrounded by great people and a good tribe, which is really hard to find once you finish university. All because I put in the effort to get on the list and attend.
Sure, not making things super easy creates slightly less inclusive communities and they are definitely smaller, but they're longer lasting, have some shared plight to bond around, and are generally of much higher quality. Allowing any old yokel easy access kills community because there are too many tourists
Are you really suggesting that you bond with fellow gamers because of how hard setting up the game was?
The browser "port" is here: https://playnox.xyz/ (200mb) -- Whether online play is available or not can be hit or miss. The single player campaign does work as well -- worth it for insta-nostalgia.
I say "port" in quotes because it's not just a matter of `cat nox.exe | emscripten > nox.js` of course. The creator posts in the subreddit / the nox community forums and has some really interesting technical comments where he explains some of the challenges.
People who can pull off something like this (talk about cross-cutting engineering skills) really blow me away.
For some reason it takes more effort to see the positives in something or someone, even ourselves.
It's often a good practice to stop and think of the positives of something. Maybe it's not so obvious. Why did someone decide to build it this way? They probably are well aware of the downsides (after all, they're the one who built it) yet they saw some upsides. They must have thought the upsides outweighed the downsides. What were they? The harder that question is to answer, I think the more useful the practice is.
Internet (and HN) discourse would be a lot better if we did more of that.
I know it's a challenge for me -- it's really easy to get stuck in a negative thought loop, especially while spending so much time on social media (incl Twitter, Reddit, and HN) where we like to award ourselves points for being critical.
[0] https://www.cracked.com/blog/the-7-stupidest-things-that-mak...
I'd even say you're less likely to be called out for being negative without giving an explanation than being positive without giving an explanation.
Though it's usually easier to explain why something sucks than why something is great, since a negative explanation has only to find which part don't work, rather than explaining why something is globally good.
> Anton Ego
Maybe GP will learn this someday, but based on their replies to you, that day is not today.
Meanwhile, they're raking in the upvotes thanks to their cyniscim, so why change their approach?
I am an avid gamer who players a couple of hours of Apex Legends and Call of Duty Modern Warfare everyday. And I've been info FPS gaming for 2 decades now.
To play a game released a couple of decades ago and see it take up almost the same amount of resources as the games I mentioned earlier gave me a chuckle.
I commend the developer for his effort though. To make a game like that run on browsers is a mighty impressive effort and it is Uber cool. I don't dispute that even for a second.
This has merits as a form of art, but as something for practical use, I do not think we should be so wasteful with computing power.
For something related, but not so wasteful (and also a form of art), look at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.kkrieger
> disk space
CS just downloaded 185mb of network resources for me to play. I would have thought those resources are stored on my disk, and not just in memory.
> installation time
That 185mb of resources took ~1 minute to download. By the time it had finished, it told me the server was full.
Regardless this is still very impressive.
But I'm sure more people played this right now because of the low barrier to entry.
And the admin rights might not even be technical. Not a lot of people are fond of installing games on the laptop from work.
But like I said, everything has tradeoffs.
No. The cracked version(s) that are played in schools and whatnot are usually just a zip file you extract and run.
Also, you don't need no stinkin App Store, zero time for installation. The only next step would be to have everything open source I think these are good tradeoffs. I rather have Freedom than performance and more and more tech users are doing this.
It's more of challenge of taking the time to add that level of polish.
Kind of like the rare native game, like League of Legends, that will let you play before the entire client is finished downloading. Being a native app didn't give Riot Games that for free, they had to specifically build it for their game. Even in the native game market, it's AAA-level polish for a small fraction of games.
Gimp running in Chrome running inside Firefox
https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death...
But we could have just stopped at assembler with that insight. I mean all the rest is just slower, and less efficient.
This is not even necessarily true. There are zero cost abstractions. Compilers can generate better assembly code than the overwhelming majority of developers.
Your point? I literally just clicked on a link, downloaded a few assets and was into an online FPS. Virtually any modern computer in the world no matter what OS/browser should be able to do the same.
But I guess for someone like you it has to be written in assembly so it's 100% efficient, even though you take 100x more to attempt to get it working than your counterpart.. and you never actually finish.
Anyone know how Quake Live worked?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NPAPI
https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Implementing_Awesom...
I enjoy when I get foreign language players of a language I know some of, it's a good way to practice IMO - wish one could choose a preferred language.
I guess they don't do that because of the impact on matchmaking (mm), the mm seems crazily sub-optimal I'd love to know that logic behind it : like when you have a game of 9 people, why you abandon it rather than finding a person from the pool of 100k waiting that will play. It could be a setting "allow game requests from mm" and they could give a little xp for it - beats searching and waiting another 10mins to start a game.
Western Russia connects to Sweden or Poland. Northern European and Eastern European countries connect through the same nodes.
Connections within Valve network are handled internally (since they can tune it for better latency, etc.) and you don't even know where the actual game server is hosted. So there is always a big mix of players no matter where you are in Europe.
Fun thought: it depends on how much throughput can be handled by Starlink, but Valve could waste some money on it to bring players closer from further away. They already have the dynamic, latency based entry node selection set up. If they hooked up some of the internal network through Starlink, it could be amazing low latency cross-continent gaming. And games like CS:GO and Dota 2 doesn't require too much bandwidth.
Assuming it is not, I wonder why? Lots of russian players, why wouldn't Valve put servers in Russia?
Also most of the dannish kingdom's land is not in Europe either.
Is the US more of a European country or an Amerind country? What would its geographic location suggest?
https://androidrookies.com/counter-strike-1-6-in-a-browser-o...
I guess there's precedent for Valve being pretty lenient with that stuff though, after all they embraced the Black Mesa HL remake when most other editors would've ceased-and-desisted it into oblivion.
They generally don't care.
Never mind, it's more like: download, wait, server full
Still awesome
The steam controller API is nicely designed: you define actions, and let the user pick a way to trigger those actions. I think there are predefined ones that already have mappings for common input devices. The API then returns an image and name to correctly prompt the user. I wish we had something like this at the browser or operating system level.
https://wicg.github.io/web-transport/
You can experiment with the initial draft version of QuicTransport today:
Is there an equivalent way to do this with the same level of efficiency in the browser? What are browsers missing in order to achieve this?
The netcode originally used in GoldSrc/1.6 came from QuakeWorld and predates Google. IIRC it got replaced at some point. The current iteration of Source's netcode doesn't have anything to do with that, though.
Do you have a source (heh) to back that? Lots of the networking configuration cvars from 1.6 are still there in CS:GO and do the same thing. Maybe it was cleaned up but I wouldn't be surprised if it's still mostly the same code.
I still remember working summer jobs saving up for the next best video card. Fun times.
But, it is so sad that we can't change the keyboard layout. So, it is sadly useless for all the people that don't have a Qwerty keyboard.
Thanks for sharing this, made my morning and took me away from development work for once!
I prefer to play https://www.krunker.io, where you can play immediately :)
Going 20 minutes already on a fast connection... still downloading things. Very ominous.
Unfortunately I downloaded resources, waited, and the server was full. After repeating for 3/4 times I gave up, so maybe a little more work needed there to cache and/or manage servers a little better for the end-user.
Still a very cool project!
That was an epic map where you could glitch into the wall with a vehicle and shoot yourself off in the air and go into the hidden gun room.
Fun times.
But for something as fast-paced as surfing, the experience is not wonderful (small input lag). Still, really impressed by this.
Sure, they don't usually have the thousands of man-hours dedicated to cheat detection, but the basics are usually sorted out.
Nonetheless, having this run in the browser just like that, no downloads, no installs, no tweaks.. im wowoed. Good job peeps
Edit: my experienece was quite nice, I launched this in Firefox on Win 10 on my mediocre laptop (i7-7560u/8gb ram)
Pings are more complicated in this setup. A low ping to a server won't help too much if you have high ping to the online client itself. Are there different clients in different locations so you can select a low-ping client?
They may have decided that instead of providing a metric that might lead people to believe it's similar to and implies the same thing as it did in the past, they'll remove it. If so, I would hope they would put something semi-equivalent in it's place. Maybe they did, but it's so removed it's hard to locate?
The server browser retreives a list of game servers from a directory server, and all that directory does is manage the list of game servers for presentation to clients.
that doesn't make sense, you download the client and you run it locally (even if in browser) so there's no notion of client ping here (unlike something like cloud gaming)
What? The client is the browser, running in your own machine. You can absolutely ping servers.
Anyhow it's a very neat project, thanks for sharing!
There's even a xkcd comic about this[0].
The real beauty of the web is to be able to jump into something just by following a link and that lets you do some really fun things. For example we recently collaborated with the streamer Day[9] to build this swarm game* he played with his audience. That basically requires the ease of access you get from the web experience: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bs1p22oI_V4
* - The whole game was also built from inside a browser.
PWA, Linux phone's dependency on web apps can help a bit, but I don't see it beyond the enthusiast/privacy market.
Because App publisher - Appstore relationship is 'scratch my back, I'll scratch yours' type relationship. Top apps isn't going to get as much telemetry from web app as they get from native app, at least not without people knowing or fighting with ad-blockers.
...really? Web development is the absolute worst development experience I've had since doing COBOL in college. I have difficulty believing anyone can claim this who has ever developed with proper tooling for anything else.
OTH. I think remember a very good browser version of Crysis. Where is it now?