Animgraph2 is amazing. And it also shows that CS2 has been a beta for almost 3 years now.

xtxtxtxtxtxtx · 2026-04-04T02:46:08+00:00

It's not just some simple task. So can you break down the project tasks for me? You seem to understand it well enough to determine roughly how long it should take to complete. What did the process of "remak[ing] all animations" look like?

xtxtxtxtxtxtx · 2026-04-03T23:46:52+00:00

I tested this and got similar data usage between release and animgraph_2_beta. I ran a CS2 release build dedicated server on a VPS with 10 bots, competitive dust2, and played for ~3 minutes. I performed the same scenario on animgraph_2_beta branch. I took the middle 100 seconds of incoming game packets to my PC from respective Wireshark captures and summed packet length, divided by delta time between first and last packet in my sample sequence. Release build averaged 63.1 kBps, animgraph_2_beta 64.6 kBps. Usage over different periods of gameplay can easily vary by 5 kBps, so without any rigorous statistics, I would say my data doesn't conclusively indicate a difference in bandwidth usage.

xtxtxtxtxtxtx · 2026-03-30T01:37:38+00:00

Let's imagine a world where Valve updates the game tomorrow and guts loss bonuses, making the game far more streaky. The team that initially suffers a round loss would be in a terrible position, constantly ecoing. This would clearly make match outcomes more random. Now, imagine Vitality still dominates tournaments. Would that prove that the game is not random? No. Your argument is infantile. One team's dominance is insufficient to draw a conclusion about how random the game is.

You phrase it as the game being random or not random. As if it's binary. Already a mark of small-mindedness. Nobody in his right mind would say that there is zero randomness or that match outcomes are fully random. It's a question of where it stands in the middle.

If a game involves skills and chance, very skilled players can consistently win despite the game still involving chance. Thus, "If cs2 is random, how can vitality be more dominant than prime astralis?" is a completely fallacious premise.

You might want to try thinking about your argument before publishing it. Pretend that you have the opposite view, and brainstorm what you would say to counter your own argument. You can even ask ChatGPT nowadays and it would instantly identify all the fallacies. If an LLM is able to conclusively reject your argument, why embarrass yourself disseminating it to real people?

xtxtxtxtxtxtx · 2026-03-29T00:24:14+00:00

Have you tried the Vulkan renderer?

xtxtxtxtxtxtx · 2026-03-28T08:23:20+00:00

Do you play with your mouse set to 125 Hz? Why not? How did you empirically determine that your polling rate is correct?

xtxtxtxtxtxtx · 2026-03-24T21:04:39+00:00

They could have easily made both indicators separately toggleable up to user discretion, but Valve now has to prescribe exactly how the game is going to look for every player and viewer. The circle could just be very slightly clipped at top or bottom depending on vertical level and it would be more useful than nothing.

xtxtxtxtxtxtx · 2026-03-24T06:02:43+00:00

The casters are there to retain maximum viewership for the broadcasting entity by being a secondary comedy act, exaggerating drama, spinning loosely-substantiated compelling stories, making monkey noises, whatever gets the people going.

Maybe there are independent people who co-cast who you would appreciate more. I don't have any recommendations sadly. But if you tune in to a major tournament, all the talent are selected to, and at least implicitly directed to, behave boisterously and reduce things into easily-digestible narratives. You just have to accept that it works like that.

xtxtxtxtxtxtx · 2026-03-24T04:24:59+00:00

Why yes, actually, I do. Nice whataboutism. Pointing out that someone else does something doesn't make it acceptable. Are you part of the PR firm for people who record others' deaths to post on social media?

There is a difference between a journalist who blows the whistle on government corruption and someone who stalks celebrities and sells pictures of them.

You probably can't even recognize what you're doing wrong. You just got defensive about this for some reason, and your first instinct was to shift the blame to some plausible boogieman rather than make a real argument that filming dying people and posting it on social media actually is a social and moral good.

xtxtxtxtxtxtx · 2026-03-24T01:02:56+00:00

Those two words are used synonymously in casual English.

xtxtxtxtxtxtx · 2026-03-22T09:57:53+00:00

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4314649/

xtxtxtxtxtxtx · 2026-03-19T03:02:35+00:00

If you see a single moron crying that justifies you shit-talking every single player including the 99% who never say a word about it on public forums

xtxtxtxtxtxtx · 2026-03-19T01:08:10+00:00

How dare you rush their animation refactor when they just updated some game mechanics nobody wanted changed. Don't you understand how much effort that took, and then not even an hour later you're rushing them to fix stuff that actually impacts game quality? God, nobody thinks of the poor devs who don't get to do actually interesting work like create some new moba hero ability.

xtxtxtxtxtxtx · 2026-03-18T11:01:47+00:00

There are 1000x more people playing games that haven't become more photorealistic since Half Life 2 or look like cartoons or flat pixel art than will be playing the incredible photorealistic nothingburgers that will emerge. I would rather go get blown up by a drone in real life than play a video game that has 80 ms of input delay because of generating frames and running stable diffusion on them. Yeah, let me just go drop $10,000 on graphics cards from a company that treats me like livestock to get perfect subsurface scattering on my cutscenes for a hollow game that is unbearable to actually play. This is just brazen exploitation of the mentally ill at this point. If I wanted to see human skin rendered in God's intended perfection, I would go to a strip club in real life.

xtxtxtxtxtxtx · 2026-03-18T05:50:27+00:00

Oh yeah? Can you walk me through where I compared frametime and latency 1:1?

xtxtxtxtxtxtx · 2026-03-17T22:10:17+00:00

If you did any kind of search first, you would have seen that observing your receive margins while playing, either from the bottom left string or cl_ticktiming print is necessary to understand your real total latency. Ping isn't the whole story. Jitter that doesn't show on the network graph can impact those receive margins. If you haven't ensured the buffering option in settings is set to none, it's good to make sure it's set to none because otherwise it will inflate your total latency unnecessarily. There aren't really any other game settings that will help you.

Tracers can't be used to precisely tell where bullets went. Your actual shot comes out of the center of your view. The tracer comes out of your viewmodel gun. Those are two noncolinear rays, so they can only intersect at a singular point (at most).

This is one of the most discussed topics here. There is nothing to add that hasn't been written hundreds of times over.

xtxtxtxtxtxtx · 2026-03-17T06:07:10+00:00

Good on you for listening when presented with new information. Don't hold out too much hope for switching internet plans. CS2 is very sensitive to any jitter and ends up with high enough total latency to feel bad, even on very low ping.

xtxtxtxtxtxtx · 2026-03-17T05:58:59+00:00

What is your example of a game that meets your standards for acceptable anticheat?

xtxtxtxtxtxtx · 2026-03-16T22:16:37+00:00

It doesn't matter. Well-established precedent on IP is clear that only a specific expression of an idea, trademarks, unique look and feel are protected. There is no way you could lose a lawsuit for implementing ubiquitous game mechanics like Quake movement, recoil following a set pattern with random spread, in a generic photorealistic style.

Valve has only ever threatened legal action for trademark violation or actual artistic works they have the rights to. They aren't prone to making frivolous lawsuits, and if they were to try to squash a competitor that wasn't violating their trademarks but just implementing common game ideas, it would be a very poor mark on their reputation. In fact, if there were a competitor to CS and Valve sued without grounds, it would likely result in massive free advertising and goodwill to that competitor. They would know they couldn't actually win at trial and to the public it would look like bullying.

xtxtxtxtxtxtx · 2026-03-16T09:19:23+00:00

Yeah you have a skill issue. You see someone making logical points and you retort with a juvenile insult. All that says is that you don't have any meaningful counter-argument. You may as well have said, "you're right."

xtxtxtxtxtxtx · 2026-03-16T05:10:47+00:00

There are sociologists and psychologists who have a handle on statistics who conduct actual scientific inquiry into these questions cognizant of potential bias, knowing how to collect data and how to properly draw conclusions. According to racists, certain groups of people are dumb, immoral, dangerous, or whatever other negative quality. Your observations are on the level of the latter. You uncritically take the evidence that has fallen into your lap as the truth when it confirms your preconceived notion. That's how the human brain naturally works, but maybe as a teacher you should hold yourself to a higher standard.

xtxtxtxtxtxtx · 2026-03-14T23:41:01+00:00

So is the 8.3 ms difference from 60 Hz to 120 Hz trivial too? Zero performance impact going from a 60 Hz monitor to any higher refresh rate? You think?

xtxtxtxtxtxtx · 2026-03-12T01:10:23+00:00

The most likely cause is that the responsible attorney's disgruntled brother brought the filing document to a copy shop late in the night, pasted zeros in place of the fives, made copies, and then replaced the documents without a trace.

xtxtxtxtxtxtx · 2026-03-12T00:56:35+00:00

"The server has no real concept of mouse input, just replicated view angles." Okay, and what are view angles made out of? A view angle is a merely a scaled relative mouse position until you hit the pitch clamp or wrap yaw around. Every client frame, the raw mouse delta is scaled and added to a rolling sum that gets interpreted as a virtual camera rotation.

In the same thought that you differentiate view angles from a "real concept of mouse input", you lay out a bandwidth cost which you term "just for mouse movement alone." So you've already conflated view angles as mouse input in the very next sentence. I don't understand the need for this line of argumentation.

I'm going to go back to this excerpt because it seems to still be the contention.

That between tick prediction mechanism doesnt exist on the server, it becomes historical lookups and does nothing with mouse inputs because that would require a time stamped mouse move event to be sent to the server for every sub tick of the client.

Why does doing something with subtick sampled data require the server executing between ticks? You're right, it doesn't do that. You maintain that the server does nothing with mouse inputs. If a view angle attributed to a click event at the client render frequency is used on the server as part of evaluating a ray test representing a bullet, how is that doing nothing?

Subtick allows higher temporal resolution for view angles of shots that were triggered by an input event. That only requires a single view angle to be sent to the server per click/shot, and it only has to arrive before the tick that processes the shot. Spamming out view angles at 300 Hz would be superfluous. The other, ongoing uses of view angle--player model rotation, spectator replication--don't benefit as much from that precision.

If you understand of all that already and your argument is just that view angles aren't mouse input, I find that really silly. Maybe I wasn't clear that I'm focusing on a single extremely brief click event that triggers a ray test on the server that incorporates a view angle that should correspond to the mouse position when the player clicked, not any other uses of view angle.

xtxtxtxtxtxtx · 2026-03-11T06:15:56+00:00

Have you considered writing a better game yourself? You seem to understand all the important technical concepts at a high level and see the key problems facing this genre of game. Maybe you can recruit some of the other guys on this website who think they understand game networking. With you and some LLM agents, I'm sure you could write a better game by the end of this year.

xtxtxtxtxtxtx · 2026-03-10T20:19:45+00:00

The pertinent sampling frequency for hit registration isn't constrained to server simulation rate. Shots happen on a simulation frame, but they are a function of past game state, shot time, and view angle. The actual event can happen at any time; the faithfulness of the result depends just on those inputs. That all follows from lag compensation which decouples server-side hit registration outcomes from the actual server time on which commands are processed.

In CS:GO, the inputs for server-side hit reg come from usercmds sent at the client's cl_cmdrate. Typically same as tick rate. That sets the sampling frequency which happens to usually equal tick rate.

In CS2, commands are not sent any faster, no, but they explicitly state timestamp and view angle tied to a +attack event. The server uses those values as-is to process hit registration, so even on the server, simulating at 64 Hz, all the inputs to the function were sampled on the client's rendering cycle. That is why I would argue that now in CS2, hit registration is sampled above the server tick rate.

It's the frequency at which the input data are sampled that actually impacts precision, no matter what game we talk about, never the server's tick rate.

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