After a long discussion in one of the community channels, we came up with an idea to improve the gameplay in CS:S. These 'gameplay' improvements would be as simple as cleaning up the maps.


As I'm not able to do such things as my knowledge of map-making is somehow deficient, I'm searching for fellow gamers / map makers to do this for the community.


Experienced so far, the fact is, that in the independently made maps such as mill, russka and fire, the fps doesn't drop like in the original maps done by valve. It's mainly because lots of these maps have irrelevant trash that are just there to ruin your day. Couple of examples: barrels in all of the maps should be removed, or made stabile, like part of the map so you could use them in your purposes (such as hiding or stacking etc.), not moving all around (it gets on your computer). Also, paintings in maps like inferno, all the frying pans and stuff flying around, the fountain thing to be made something morehow solid, so that wont ruin your fps. Also all the breaking, loose objects on the maps should be removed, the ceiling-fans in inferno and such. Also maybe brush the walls a bit and fiddle with the invisible things there are, lower the count of polygons and textures, since in dust2 for example, you watch some wall and your fps is on 99, and then you turn around and watch an another wall which looks identical, altho your fps is 60. Ambience sound loops, all the bell shits in inferno. Also making the walls / surroundings thicker in the bomb sites so defusing through would not be possible.


Those were just examples, there's plenty of more to fix around too, so we just need a capable map maker, who could do this for the game. I would gladly help the maker to find the bugs and of course any other help would be appreciated.


I for one don't know anything about map making nor editing, but I'd say that it wouldn't be so hard to either redo the maps by layout (ok that could be hard:D) or edit them a bit to get all the junk away. Like with these minor changes we could already improve the gameplay in maps without the need of waiting for valve to get their updates done.


I will update this blog as soon I come up with some new ideas, or you present some, or as we get our level editing going on!


If there's anyone who would like to give this a go, it would be highly appreciated. Please get in contact with me at least for discuss, aNgeldustt@gmail.com

UPDATES: Currently we have xree and Junks going for the maps, Junks has already done quite a lot of work considering train to put into more of a competitive play. He has managed to improve the fps in the map in some spots even by 100 units, and the map hasnt lost anything 'important' yet. All about little fiddling he has done great job so far.

Here's a few screenshots sarine took!


Normal train

Competive train


We've decided to run the maps with the prefix cm_ so you can identify these competitive maps by that.