Steam Weekly News Update

[CSN NewsBot]

The latest edition of the weekly Steam news update is fresh from the oven.

Over the next few weeks we'll have updates coming to Counter-Strike: Source and Day of Defeat: Source, starting with one new level for each. Last week we talked about de_nuke making its return to Counter-Strike, and this week we'd like to shed some light on the new Day of Defeat: Source map coming, named Argentan. We've included a screenshot from today's playtest.

Argentan

Coming soon, we'll have news about a new game that's coming to Steam before the end of the year. We're looking forward to giving people a chance to check it out.

So it seems that the new maps will be coming sooner than the rest of the promised updates. I am 99.554% sure I can deal with that!

[GodsmackeD]

cool.

[Ryosuke T]

really loving the looks of this new map.

[snkcube]

Awesome update.

[HowlinMadMurphy]

Goodie. New maps are always fun.

[thepingofdeath]

looks like they ripped it straight out of MOHAA actually. which is a good thing.

[entRo]

I think Valve needs to start getting a little more creative with their textures. It's always the same kinda-dirty grass, the same wooden shacks, and all of trees the in HL2 and all HL2 mods (CS:S and DoD:S included) have the same dead look to them.

[DaRk-AnGeL]

That's because there is no depth to any of the textures, and the engine is still limited by hardware. e.g. let's say we wanted to recreate a corn field or a poppy field that swayed in the wind, or a tree that shed blossoms. This would require a lot of resources, which just wouldn't be possible on most peoples hardware. Hopefully the era of the flat textured enviroments will come to an end within the next few years, and we'll see grass that LOOKS, FEELS and reacts like grass. Until then, just keep squinting at those generic textures :)

[thepingofdeath]

the era IS here--the HL2 eingine has support for parallax mapping, it's just not implemented. i mean there's some kind of command like r_parallaxmapping "0". and if Asheron's Call 2 can have realistic, swaying grass that reacts to a wind variable in a realistic fashion, there's no reason why HL2's more advanced engine can't. it's developer apathy and a feeling that they have to watch out for the little guy with a shitty rig.