Play Counter Strike 1.6, with full multiplayer, in the browser
play-cs.com
play-cs.com
Most FPSs up to this point were SciFi based, guns like the BFG and plasma guns. Counterstrike's focus on realism really altered how you connected with the game. Columbine had happened very recently and was still very much in the zeitgeist. There was a very real cultural attack on video games as a scapegoat for the massacre.
My friends and I would build CounterStrike maps that were the layout of our highschool and would then run around and shoot each other. This was very taboo at the time. We knew that this would be interpreted as threatening by the powers-that-be at highschool, but it was exciting.
There was a small netcafe nearby when I was young that had a good quality T1 connection and hosted their own CS servers. Some of the players got together and actually mapped out the entire netcafe store itself and some of the surrounding area to create a "de_" style map.
This meant you could be playing CS and spawn in the same room that you were actually sitting in.
I can still remember vividly as a 14 year old playing the game and completely dominating a room full of 20-something older guys in the other room. They didn't know who I was and every time I would stomp them they would yell "FUCK" from the other room. Eventually after a series of absurd kills they angrily stormed over to our room in a hostile manner ready to fight and 100% convinced I was somehow cheating. The look on their face when they realized they were "prepared" to fight a kid and the realization as I openly allowed them to inspect the PC for whatever they thought was modified on it was hilarious.
Oh man, I remember the good ol' days, when a 1.5 Mbps connection was unthinkably fast. I imagined only God herself had a T3.
Almost made me swear online multiplayer off for life.
I have never, ever seen pings as low as the ones I've seen 15/20 years ago when playing online.
I remember when I played Counter Strike 1.5 or 1.6 on a 10 MBit fiber which was very new at the time and pinging on servers nor far my house (few miles) even sub 10 ms. Those were numbers that competed with lan servers over ethernet.
Nowadays I have a much better connection, and yet, I rarely see myself with such a small latency anymore, it's at least twice that.
PC Bang in Columbia MD circa 2006! $3/hr. Spanking fresh GeForce 7900s.
Starcraft was really why every one showed up though ;)
Everyone showed up for CS or Red Alert it seemed!
People just don't understand how good reaction times are for teenagers - even in your twenties it's already getting worse!
Well. We only ended up playing with them a couple of times, because it ended up feeling uncomfortably gruesome - shooting and and killing your friends in cs_italy or whatever.
Mapping out familiar buildings and locations? A much less traumatizing use of time and resources. Kudos.
I laughed so hard about this, I can picture this in my mind.
Those prefixes indicate the map mission type, not a style. "de" indicates a demolition or defusal mission. The actual official map name is what's after the underscore. I think there were only those and the "cs" "counterstrike" hostage maps at the start.
I had a friend that was the victim of a local news "expose" on this. Just a harmless high school geek who thought it would be fun to combine the School blueprints with his CAD course to build a "fun" way of digitizing the blueprints.
The main lesson we learned from this exercise is that the Duke Nukem 3D pistol is totally OP when used in realistically proportioned hallways. Auto-aim and all.
The other lesson we learned is that local news investigative reporters care more about a compelling story than to represent the mundane truth.
We got our aggressions out on deathmatch, but it never occurred to us in a million years to actually hurt people IRL. We hated the jocks and the preps with the burning passion of a billion Wolf-Rayet stars, but never thought to hurt any of them, we simply accepted our lot in the genetic and social lottery and hoped to get revenge later in life (so far so good, judging by facebook).
We knew that this would be interpreted as threatening by the powers-that-be at highschool
These days that kind of behavior, if reported to law enforcement (mandatory reporting in some cases), will get investigated with the potential for criminal charges, and likely school expulsion.Without a clear expression of threat, I don't think simple mapmaking is sufficient grounds for a terror threat charge.
It's not simple mapmaking though is it? It's creating a map inside a video game to simulate school grounds.
Drawing a map of the school and putting it in a frame on your wall? Fine.
Drawing a map, recreating it inside a first person shooter, then spending hours playing (training) memorizing the map? I believe anyone could see that as a terroristic threat.
Edit: Example Legos. Having a Lego model of the US Capital? Fine
Have a Lego Capital, attend the Jan 6 protest, have books and other militia type information? Probably going to get questioned by the feds.
https://www.businessinsider.com/fbi-took-lego-set-of-capitol...
Ah yes, forgotten artifacts of an innocent past.
I think every budding DOOM and Duke Nukem 3D map creator made their school at one point. Of course, that was years before Columbine (despite the inclusion of DOOM in the Columbine finger-pointing), and nobody thought twice about it then.
I miss map making. The hammer editor wasn't the best but it was simple enough to figure out, and I actually had some old blueprints of the house layout that made it easier to get things to scale. I don't think many newer games like Call of Duty have the same community spirit of community servers, community maps, etc.
I was never that good a mapper but it got me into computers in general.
If I had never discovered Hammer Editor on one summer afternoon in 2008, my life would be SOOOO different
I still have it, you can view some screenshots and download the bsp here: https://gzalo.com/en/projects/cs_electronicaort/
I didn't like playing with people who were too much focused on killing+owning/taunting other players though, it was (and still is) my limit.
It’d be nice to see that again now…
Same except in Age of Empires 2. We got in minor trouble for it.
Counter to others I'm actually surprised by how little I enjoyed it. I used to play a ton of FPSes back in the day (CS betas to 1.6 heyday) then stopped for well over a decade. Picked up Call of Duty during the pandemic as a means to stay social with friends and told myself barely anything had changed. Boy was this a great lesson that things have, in fact, changed a lot.
If you go back to something as recent as COD Vanguard, you will find the gunplay is likely closer to what you recall. I play in lobbies like Ship Haus 24/7 to get myself warmed up. It is really hard to feel competent dropping straight into a gigantic campaign-style map with skilled players scattered throughout.
Current games control severs, pre 2010 games gave users control.
The pandemic had some really good times.
I tried this web CS1.6 and was immediately greeted with "your skill level is too low for this server" :/
* CTRL+R (reload) causes the page to refresh
* CTRL+W (walk forward) attempts to close the current tab
* CTRL+S (walk backward) opens a dialog to save the current page
* CTRL+D (walk right) bookmarks the current page
Luckily firefox shows a confirmation dialog before refresh or closing the tab, but that causes the game to freeze until you dismiss it.
Also sound didn't work at all
But I still won't get them any credit, since it is purely a coincidence that their mappings happened not to mess with this one browser game.
Not really a coincidence and that's not the only scenario where it's preferable to have a dedicated command key
Repurposing that key to instead perform unrelated arbitrary commands is the insane move, and it only seems normal because you grew up using Windows and never thought to question it.
Apple's mappings make much more sense, especially with both OSs having a Meta key.
It's good to know that "command" will run commands. Easier to explain to new users too.
The Windows key is indeed a missed opportunity. The main reason the opportunity was missed is likely to be because Microsoft did not control the hardware. Even after Windows 95 was introduced, many keyboards continued to lack the Windows key for quite a while. How do you deal with that? Not allowing apps to run? Having a fallback for when there isn't a windows key? Now the interface is inconsistent.
that's CUA. Which is a much nicer and saner standard than Emacs/Vi keybindings.
anyway, this is just a coincidence, CS was a Windows only exclusive-full-screen game where those combinations had no possible conflict
no one thought we would be playing CS in a browser in the future
on Macs the CMD key is simply a poor man's CTRL key, except when you are in a terminal, where you have to use CTRL again...
doesn't sound so well thought.
Let me check.
Cmd-F in Notes.app, finds things in the current note.
Cmd-F in Terminal.app, finds things in the current terminal session's history.
Cmd-C in Calendar.app, copies an event.
Cmd-C in Terminal.app, copies the selected text.
Cmd-T in Finder.app, opens a tab.
Cmd-T in Terminal.app, opens a tab.
Cmd-W closes the current window/tab. Cmd-Q quits the app. Cmd-S saves. And so on, in any app, tracing back to 1984 or so.
Whereas Ctrl-C, Ctrl-T, Ctrl-F, Ctrl-S, on Windows/Linux... all do wildly different things, depending whether you are in an xterm, cmd.exe, a game, Emacs, or some other app.
You know what else? Ctrl-C in Terminal.app does the same thing as Ctrl-C in an xterm. This sort of thing is consistent in every app. You're literally having your cake and eating it too.
Windows couldn't use Ctrl-W to mean "close the current tab" in every single application, because - indeed, in a game, holding down Ctrl could mean crouch/sneak, and W to move forward. Windows could've chosen to use Win-W for that, but ignored the opportunity.
> anyway, this is just a coincidence
One of these patterns visible here is deliberate design, the other is piled up coincidences. I don't think it's that easy to confuse one for the other?
Edit: It looks like it has a notification to use C while in windowed mode
The current focus is on the Unreal Engine (4.24, 4.27) and UE5 support which is coming later this year. Other engines will follow such as Unity, Godot, Open 3D Engine, and custom engines we can provide porting for on our paid plans. We're building out a WebGPU backend for UE5, to really enable high end desktop and console quality games in HTML5.
Further reading, with demos attached:
When games are a single click away, no dedicated client or launcher download required.... anyone can be a gamer.
He had a special CRT monitor to get the best refresh rate to be as competitive as possible for the game
Feels like a lifetime ago
Funny enough, my semi-pro career (I made $60 total) ended when I abandoned my surround sound when moving out in undergrad.
The only headphone issue I had in my decades of playing CS were with open ear headphones (Sennheiser HD555) that reduced the punchiness of bass and made footsteps more difficult to hear in CSS which was a terrible game with terrible audio.
That said it does require that the game has good 3D sound generation, which isn't trivial, especially differentiating front and back which requires accounting for the shape of the human ear.
Also, I'm pretty sure the brain uses small movements of the head to know where sounds come from. So you'd have to have head tracking with virtually no latency.
A bunch of speakers in a circle around you don't have any of these issues.
By having a 5.1 setup surrounding me (about 2 feet away in each direction, it was.. cluttered), the brain produces a surround sound effect the way it does in normal life.
An expert would have to speak further about how headphones can emulate that, but I don't recall it ever really being a thing in the early 2000s.
Like any game, you get huge value out of slight advantages when you get to the more high level skill.
But even when they're not on stage, they're often in the same room with their teammates. And even if that isn't the case for some reason and a player is in their own room, winning those tournaments is generally the highest honor, so pro players would likely want to practice as close to tournament conditions anyways.
Directional audio over headphones is surprisingly good nowadays, though. HRTF is pretty cool stuff.
I haven't thought of Ventrilo/Teamspeak in years...
People like that always trying to compensate for a lack of skill
I remember in UT99 for years always running into situations where my aim was slightly off in situations where I was dead sure it should have hit. Turns out it just used the mouse acceleration feature in windows: the speed at which you move the mouse influences how far the crosshair (or cursor) moves. Once I disabled that I became about 5x better. The next big jumps were turning off vsync (and making sure it doesn't turn itself back on) and going back to CRT from LCD.
I play RTS games, which don't need any fancy equipment to play and win, but still don't believe you need a 5K USD monitor to play CS.
My point is those things that cost money don't help win, reader, unless you're talking about those Nike sprinting shoes that were all the rage in the Olympics last year, those things rule.
Yes, all of that stuff can make a slight difference, but at the end it's not going to be a determining factor in your skill.
Those binds all work on this version btw! I automatically did b43o2,,,o3o4o5 and got everything I wanted
I should check that it's available in historical repositories and if not, see where I can send it for posterity.
You will find an almost identical structure in virtually every Call of Duty multiplayer experience - One big room with 4 "cubes" in it that players fight around, with various degrees of partial cover scattered throughout.
And using headphones on iceworld gave you wallhack like abilities.
Precisely. I found it much easier to get my friends interested in playing CS at LAN parties with this map (or something wacky like jeepathon2k).
I always found it such a shame that a map like as_oilrig never took off in a competitive sense. Always thought "protect the VIP" was a really cool concept, but I guess the rest of the world disagreed.
Agreed on the hostage maps. TFC had that one map too...
The latency advantage was real.
During new year holidays, I could spent 10+ hours everyday with my two uncles playing CS 1.5 there, having meals at our computer desks. The contrast between super cold outdoor (-20 degree Celsius) and cozy warmth indoor provides extra sense of satisfaction.
My younger uncle was so good at it that we could hear one frustrated player from another side of the floor shouting at the game server manger asking to kick my uncle’s player out.
Needless to say, once I was playing I felt so gradified and cool. My dad brought home a 'flat' CRT a few months later from his work. It felt life changing at the time.
A while later, I thought it would be fun to try out some of the cheat packs.. It didn't take more than 15 minutes for a ban. Still have a VAC ban on record with Steam. 6,400ish days ago. Its an odd reminder, and badge of honor.
I miss those times a lot.
There was: "Exception thrown: Uncaught SimulateInfiniteLoop" Uncaught SimulateInfiniteLoop
The game play is so much better, and more intense in Counter-Strike:
* Respawn points are consistent
* You have to manage money
* It gets intense when you are the only one left on your team
They've dug themselves into a hole with the "new operators every N weeks" pattern, but the depth of the game combined with the ultimately mechanical thrill of an FPS is a joy
That said, the game is a unique fun. I'm glad I chose to participate.
[0]: https://gamesbustop.com/ps5-games-that-supports-keyboard-and...
I'm curious about how it's actually executing in the browser (WebGL? WebGPU? WASM, even?) but cant seem to be able to get onto a server to poke around at the moment.
Its honestly very difficult to play, its really not suited for Casual players(playing on speakers with mediocre mice and so on) especially with the very difficult aiming system.
But I didn't find anything that is both free or basically free and can run on everything, from macbooks with Intel/m2 GPU to a gaming PC.
Overwatch 2, too gimmicky and heavy
Fortnite, same thing and we hate battle royal, so no COD WZ2 and so on.
Its definitely an improvement on playing C&C Generals with endless problems that come with a game, which is checks notes 20 years old now.
Team Fortress 2 is still alive and well
Mediocre mouse or whatever keyboard aren't the only issues I guess. You have to analyze everything about yourself properly to determine when you need a better mouse or not.
Really cool in gun game. Also, the vehicle maps were a blast :)
It lagged way to much to be playable. Also sound seem to be not working.
edit: Try in Chrome, it is decently playable and has sound, it doesn't work in Firefox.
I've joined cyber cafes and made life-long friends that last till now, travelled to different countries to play against other teams and won tournaments nation-wide when the main prize was a can of beer and a motherboard.
We used to pick-up our keyboards, discuss mouse DPI and how it influences aim as well as trying to figure out whether 640 or 800 was the best resolution.
I am glad that this game was made, such nostalgia!
Also if someone wants to go down the memory lane remember the golden age of CS movies? Annihilation?
To clarify, this mixes proprietary code with GPL code from id software. Valve has spoken out about the engine used [1] before and has barred it from being used for mods on Steam.
[1] http://web.archive.org/web/20160701071741/http://www.moddb.c...
Ah, the nostalgia from the late 90s / early 2000s.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/KeyboardEve...
It feels like custom maps aren't as big a part of gaming now days for some reason
It's mostly the console gaming experience has taken over with few outlets for modding. FPS kids these days don't know what it's like to precision aim with a mouse or have a piece of clear tape stuck to their CRT so they can 360 no-scope w/ AWP.
Scary.
But, a classmate had killed me several times in a row and was having a good laugh about it. I gave him a middle finger and then got back into the game.
At the end of the class, the teacher handed me a detention slip and then explained that he had been standing behind me watching my screen when I flipped the bird.
We had teachers who'd let us stay in the classroom over breaks to play the game, lol.
That's the way it's done.
Owned.
Follow me.
Fire in the hole.
Roger that.
Affirmative.
Ah, negative.
Let's go sir.
Go Go Go.
..... good stuff
¹ https://i.imgur.com/JKzbRTV.png
I was an avid CS 1.5/1.6 player in the early 2000s. This is def a bookmark!
Steam version has around 14k players right now.
I am running firefox nightly version 109.0a1
G-g-g-g-g-god like
I took this famous screenshot that was subsequently used in several advertisements for the game: https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/672345936449634304/77...
Here's one of them advertising a "personal server" on Planethardware: https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/672345936449634304/77...
I also found my screen used in an alienware ad, an Xbox magazine talking about Counterstrike, and Gamespy ads. It was wild.