> My friends and I would build CounterStrike maps that were the layout of our highschool and would then run around and shoot each other.
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.
I remember thinking the T1 that lit up my entire school district was insanely fast. That was until I went to college and found they had a 2Gbit fiber optic Internet2 link on campus. That was mind blowing.
My memory was marathon on the Mac played over a similar connection speed. I forget the software but it allowed a networked game to be emulated over a PPP dialup session.
Doom was ok over dial up computer to computer. Quake was even slow connected direct over modem. I would guess the slowness was the extra data for the 3rd dimension going over the wire.
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.
I agree about the big comercial servers/games. The community driven servers are often better latency, e.g. I got 7ms in this game, the same server was 60ms when gaming through the VPN and enterprise proxy.
Nice! I've always appreciated how moddable games like this have traditionally been. I texture-mapped? skinned? myself and my friends onto the models in the Counterstrike installations we had on the four computers we kept LAN'd together in our apartment.
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.
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.
That is correct. The pedantic and accurate term would be "objective" since they are basically modify the win conditions of the round, but I chose to use the word "style" because it comes down to how you want to play the game.
There are many players that play "cs_" maps where you're technically supposed to be grabbing hostages and returning them to the spawn zone, but many players chose to play those maps in a different style where they just eliminate all the other players or run out the timer.
Likewise on "de_" maps you're supposed to plant the bomb, but instead many players choose to simply use the bomb to pressure (by essentially tricking the enemy into thinking you care about the bomb) people into situations and trade out kills.
Nope. I just remember the early versions. I didn't get hooked--stopped well before it was moved to Steam, which I thought was bloatware (and it was back then). My younger brother was obsessed with it for a while, though.
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.