this guy knows how to make a video, that totally sold me too. basically "if they don't change anything, nothing changes, but really, everything has changed. cs wont, but could, but wont, but might, and heres how easy different is." genius.
The cave didn't look very good imo... The rocks jutting out were so shiny you'd think they were covered in oil! I think they should tone it back, as currently I prefer Source 1 after watching this.
@@FinalStooge Everything in the real world has a shine to it to some degree, its what Physically Based Rendering is based on, i suggest you give it a read some time.
I just want an engine that doesn't force map makers to make their maps bland in order for it to actually run properly. As well as fixing all the serious bugs that we have been putting up with for years. Smoke occlusion, objects falling through the map, etc.
To be fair, most of those issues are left over from GoldSrc, 90% of the functions used for things in 2007-2013 source branches are just left over because they HAVE to be. Theres so many parameters with entities that don't DO anything in source because they were only used in GoldSrc that had to be forward ported in for functionality-sake. Source 2, like Source, is just the same skin but with new, better code because Source got so spaghetti coded over the years they genuinely had to start over to not break anything.
@@Choochinc Yea, RIP cache. It looked so good and they had to kill it. Hopefully source 2 cache will be able to look pretty without the weird lag issues.
What I see in this video is that Source 1 (an engine which will turn 20 yo soon!!) was absolutely ground breaking for its time. Looks stunning even today.
I'm excited to see if he's going to port it to prove a point about S1 maps being unsuitable for S2, or if he's going to remake it to prove a point about S2's mapping tools being better.
@@solaris5303 I think he could simply partner with a good artist and focus on reworking the layout as a whole, that would make a great series of videos. He could playtest the new layout with his servers etc...
Small thing about the around 6 minutes mark: Ambient occlusion is only the "shadows in corners" stuff. Light bouncing to other surfaces and carrying colour is called indirect illumination, or more commonly global illumination. AO and skylight are usually included in GI solutions too.
@@dissolve5138 It's just how the AO is processed. Source 1 looks like it's just multiplying the result, whereas Source 2 looks like it's using the AO pass to project the colour of adjacent surfaces to simulate light bounces.
@@dissolve5138 I don't think this is true for most real-time renderers-- maybe for a raymarcher, though. I'd guess that realtime GI, even raytraced, is nowhere near granular/accurate enough to really calculate how much light is contributed to a given pixel in say, in the crevices of a wrinkled jacket. The algorithms are probably focused on the vague contributions of bounce light at a broader scale, lest they be incredibly slow. I think most modern games still ship with a separate AO step too, but I can't recall.
There's a "GPU Ray Tracing Visualization" mode in S2 Hammer now, it was released in the latest Dota2 update, as well as a "CPU RT Spherical Harmonics" (real time GI). Plus they added or are working on "Meshlet" support (Basically UE5 Nanite).
It's awesome seeing you make a video about Source 2, as it's becoming more and more relevant to the CS:GO players. I hope we'll see more from you on this topic and perhaps while doing so, you will become one of us - a Source 2 addict. As for the 7:08 lighting bug, it is usually created when a scene is lit up with low amount of indirect light (generally low-light conditions) that is bounced around by relatively reflective materials. Without changing the lighting conditions, what will help is increasing the lightmap resolution (the Final compile is at 2k quality, but you can go up to 8k). You can also often encounter a similar bug, where the shadows appear "blobby" - they're not accurate and some parts are darker than they should be, while others are lighter. That happens when you have more than 4 lightsources with "Baked Light Indexing" checked, shining on the same surface - so try to avoid that by unchecking "Baked Light Indexing" for less important lights or by placing the lights in spots where they don't intersect (there's a special "Baked Light Complexity" scene view for that.) Oh and if you want to enjoy even MORE of cubemaps, there is a way to increase their resolution, by modifying the "EnvironmentMapFaceSize" and "EnvironmentMapRenderSize" values in your gameinfo .gi (located in game>hlvr>). Alright, I hope you'll have fun with testing the limits of Source 2 and if there's anything, I'd love to help.
Those corrected/parallaxed cubemaps gotta be my favorite graphical effect in games. I love all the bokeh and AO etc. and even film grain, but the cubemaps are satisfying to look at when set up like this. Lightweight solution for reflections and such a genius way of doing it. Mirrors in ps2 era games are very cool too. I notice how some games such as RDR2 use three different kinds of reflection types on water together. First there's general low quality cubemap underneath all, then ssr and where ssr isn't visible, there's some low quality looking 3D looking objects being reflected such as simple trees. In between those two effects. Not entirely sure what technique that is but yeah probably just to patch out what ssr can't accomplish and together none of it is barely ever noticeable.
instead of cubemaps it may be a planar reflection, a limited low quality version of the environment is being rendered through the surface, much cheaper than ray tracing, preserves 3d objects inside of the area and doesn't rely on screeen space data.
@@fxncy2566 I think I recently noticed in Skyrim, the reflections of water are just the low detail map versions of terrain. Yeah it's probably exactly that, then. Smart techniques.
Theres a very important thing you missed in the reasons why Source 2 cubemaps look better: Source 2 cube maps are pre-filtered. This means that when they render a cubemap, they use magic light calculations that output several "levels" of blurry reflections. Then, according to the smoothness of the material, it chooses a level from the cubemap that its either blurry, clear, or somewhere in between. This way more rough surfaces that still reflect the world, like smudges, less polished surfaces, etc, show blurry reflections, and clear surfaces shows a clear one. There is a specific technique I saw on parallax cubemaps that fixes the outdoor sky issue. Weirdly enough I found it on SEGA's Sonic Forces, and havent found other examples, but I believe the technique its also used on Unreal engine. When they render cubemaps, they also save which pixels are actually the sky. When the game shows a reflective surface, when the reflection points to the sky, it swaps from the parallaxed cubemap, to an infinte cubemap thats just the sky. This way both close 3d models and the infinite sky are both perfectly reflected.
Saving which pixels are the sky in a reflection probe is likely done either with the alpha channel, or by storing a cubemap with a depth buffer alongside another cubemap with the color buffer. Saving the depth buffer likely allows for more advanced parallax correction or more accurate shading of the ambient light generated by the reflection probe.
Few years ago I was really all for RTX and raytracing stuff but recently I can't help but appreciate the cleaner simplicity of pre-calculated lighting and cubemaps. No muddyness. No AI upscaling. No artifacts. Half Life Alyx is still the most gorgeous thing on my PC.
It's interesting how many big games got caught in development hell due to engine problems in the 2010s: HL Alyx on Source 2, FFXV on Luminous, Cyberpunk on Red engine 4, MGSV on the Fox Engine to name a few.
Any company relying on their own game engine will eventually have to delay games to build a more modern engine And any company relying on someone else's engine has to hope that that someone will continue to update/improve their engine, or else they will have problems aswell It seems really stressful to be a game company
EDIT: It turns out the Stanley Parable remake was made in Unity instead of Source. My bad! About the pre-calculated lighting improvements: I'm pretty sure Stanley Parable was done in Source 1, correct? And its remaster was done in the same engine, right? Yet the new remaster has vastly superior lighting. I was really impressed while playing it. I knew it was pre-baked but the lighting was so cleverly designed, and combined with higher resolution of the shadow maps it looked very moody and effective. It achieved the same effect as raytracing sometimes does, even if the environments and light sources are completely static.
I love using parallax corrected cubemaps! In unity they're referred to as "box projected". I remember discovering them back in 2018(ish) when trying to make a map for VRChat and it absolutely blew me away how you can make a simple pre-baked reflection almost look a full proper reflection. That combined with pre-baked lighting and light probes (which allows real-time objects to receive pre-baked lighting, idk if source or source 2 has anything like that) really taught me just how clever games have gotten with emulating raytracing.
Those are all fine & dandy until a scene has objects in them that move, which is the biggest reason raytracing is superior. Still cool to see convincing tricks & try to see how far you can stretch them until they start breaking up.
@@MLWJ1993 Light probes do exist specifically to solve the problem when it comes to moving objects and baked lights but obviously don't work when it comes large, open world maps. Cubemaps + screen space reflections are pretty manky even at the best of times though. Ghostwire with raytracing disabled is basically a masterclass in every place where SSR fails lol
idk about Source, but Source 2 does use light probes. Also, what about planar reflections? As I understand it, they are more expensive than cubemaps or screen space reflections, but are basically perfect and still much faster than ray tracing.
The source 2 lightning looks way nicer. The light is actually bouncing around and filling the space. I hope super dark spots *right* next to bright spots are soon to be gone in games (or at least minimized)
I haven’t been this excited to fuck around with source game mechanics since your first mapping tutorial series. I can’t wait for the eventual CS update
I really enjoy your informative videos as your explanations really make me feel like I am getting the hang of everything and you've even inspired me to pursue my dreams of creating games when I watched your videos about your games you've made in the past, I also enjoy all the music that's in your videos so I even tried making some of my own, I thought I'd comment this just to show my appreciation as I've been watching you for over 2 years now and I still don't get bored of your content. Keep doing as well as your doing and make sure you enjoy yourself because I enjoy it.
not sure if you watched the fmpone crash course on s2 but if you make a cube map box that extends to the entire level it fixes the outdoor cube map issue, valve does this in alyx
Source 2 also gives mappers control over the density of light probes which aids with grounding dynamic objects with the static objects. Light probes are light samples taken from different points in space(kinda like a 3d light map). In practice this means physics props, dynamic(animated) props, npcs, and players will blend in much better with the environment(depending on the map of course). One thing i forgot to mention a couple months ago is the lighting of static props in source 2 is leagues ahead of source 1.
I'd be really interested how you can squeeze out more performance from Source 2 vs source 1 and how much different graphics APIs (Vulkan vs DX9) can also pull out when on these two engines.
Not really a contest. Vulkan is so much better. In fact, nowadays it's probably recommended to set up dxvk on Windows whenever you can just because it's that much better. Probably all of CSGO's cpu and single core issues are all DX9 related.
Source 1 compile time bounce lighting can be heavily affected by the $REFLECTIVITY settings in the VMT of the material being hit with a ray, so you can get good results clearing up dark areas by modifying this (it's RGB intensity iirc), perhaps making a duplicate VMT pointing to the same base material but with different reflectivity settings. Or you can just use the old dim floating light entity to mimic what you would expect from a bright light source (e.g Sun) bouncing into a nearby dark tunnel or something. I have to admit, I'm having major trouble understanding how to use Source 2's texturing, and I see some differences in your source 2 version of the map here texture wise I think, too. I'm sure it's much better and more technically "correct" for a modern engine, but I can't seem to hit a groove with it like I can in Source 1. Oh yeah, although CS:GO does have HRTF audio to replace the old surround system\or EAX from older source 1 games, source 2 uses Steam Audio for spatial audio, which I should think would be a lovely audio upgrade in terms of being able to hear exactly where the enemy is around corners. It runs on any OpenCL capable graphics card using Radeon Rays. Regarding volumetrics etc, these could actually AID gameplay. If a player gets in front of a light source, the volumetrics may help define them at distances or with obstacles in the way, I think? Or fog for players HIDING in intentionally in carefully chosen areas of the map. Convincing material surface shaders might also help with player readability regarding what surfaces act in certain ways, for instance things you can shoot through or break. BTW, for those that don't know, be careful decreasing lightmap scale in Source 1. It works by subdividing the face into smaller faces, but overlays have a maximum face limit. You may only have an overlay on one face, but if that face has a low lightmap scale, it is effectively many faces, and may hit the limit of how many overlays are allowed on the brush, getting a somewhat unhelpful error when trying to compile that you can't seem to figure out how to fix. Also, that clip of spyro made me remember how terrible the reignited collection portals are compared to the original. In the original Spyro 1, each portal had a completely separate vertex painting skydome visible only inside the portal frame for the level you were going to. Entering it seamlessly takes the camera inside, loads the level, and has spyro land in the new level without a single fade to black. Reignited just has a blurred cubemap and fades. C'mon, an original playstation with 1MB usable ram did it better :(
By the way philip, if you don't know the brighter effect that Source2 has at the beginning is called 'Global Illumination'. And it's pretty much the last hurdle light renderers need to get through to have the standard 'good' lighting
I audibly yelped when the cave transferred from S1 to S2. Absolutely insanely good-looking. S2's graphics are absolutely insanely underrated. I haven't heard enough people talking about just how absurdly good it can look.
I don't know if you've heard of it before or not, but Portal 2: Desolation is a mod that has very similar graphical capabilities. It's S1-based, but they basically rewrote the entire rendering side of the game engine lol
The problem with updating CS:GO to Source 2 is just the simple fact that it requires more resources. With most every game released, most devs don't really care about making their games playable on old hardware, instead making it pretty, needing it to run on modern hardware. Valve is different. They want the game to still be playable for older and less powerful computers, and the community agrees. The backlash Valve faces every time they visually update a map shows that there's still a part of the community that plays on a decade old Integrated Graphics CPU chipset. Just by the example of the size of the maps and the increased load times, a lot of people using this old hardware will raise a fuss about it, because it will impact their ability to run the game in a playable state. Valve wants this game to be playable by everyone, no matter their set-up. It's one of the reason why CS:GO is still popular to this day. Even a decade old laptop could play this game with a little effort. A lot of people that can't play the new Call of Duty or other Triple-A shooter will play CS:GO instead, making the game continue it's steady and huge player base over the years. Updating to Source 2 would be nice, but the backlash the Valve could get from it just outweigh the benefits of the upgrade. There are still people to this day that complain about Aztec *cough cough*, I mean Ancient, being hard to run for their computers. A great example of this was the downgrades to TF2. Valve intentionally reduced a lot of graphical load, just to make the game more accessible to older hardware. Valve faced a little backlash for it, but the fact that more people being able to play the games, outweighs any outrage by the downgrades.
Source 2 doesn't necessarily require more resources, but it might require newer resources. Newer engines tend to do things more efficiently, but then in the product are also tuned to produce much better graphics which increases resource use.
Good point! I think they're driven mostly by their business interest: when game is playable for more people with old hardware, more people will bring them money by buying skins and using casino cases. This way even poor fellas from developing countries will be interested in doing so. That's why I think Source 2 maps will not differ so much from Source 1 ones, as they will try to keep performance more or less the same.
I really hope Valve makes Source 2 easy for wide use. I would love to see more games on other engines besides UE. Hell I’d love to make a source 2 game as well.
For some reason I forget that I have alredy liked the video while watching it, so when Im realising that I'm really enjoying the video I try to like it once again. I reliked this video 3 times =)
"source 1 is darker than source 2, and it doesn't match even if you increase the brightness" - Dude, you were using different hdri to light the maps (city x cloudy day), of course they are going to be different
Holy... Philip you explain the cubemap part so well! I've known what cubemaps were for so long yet the way source 2 tackles it and the entire google earth explanation.. I had no idea.. Seriously, this may be a weird part I'm stuck on yet I'm really impressed.
Also I love all the suggestions in this list. It makes me think of something like a source 2 "mythbusting" or "fun facts" series of videos. Or even just full on source 2 mapping tutorials, including how you managed to get a first-person camera, loading HL:A maps and assets, etc.
PBR materials and higher resolution lightmaps really do wonders to how things look. Just looking at some of the maps and assets created for modern quake ports that support PBR, HDR lightmaps and realtime lighting there is a huuuuge difference even when compared to high resolution texture replacements using the old shader format (or lack thereof).
This comment only comes out of a place in my heart for you, I absolutely loved this video and damn those Corrected cube maps do look like ray traced reflections however, I almost felt like you did not sell the first example comparison as well as you could have. The Source 2 baked lighting looks really good, it immediately reminded me of the ray tracing shader in Minecraft and that is high praise. Although I have been aware of the fact that Source 1 uses ray tracing to bake the lightning it just never looked like Ray tracing to me, it is very inaccurate and limited however with Source 2 even with its stock settings it looked very convincing, and I dont understand how you thought that just brightening up the Source 1 map made it comparable, that is strange coming from you. Even the most amped up Source 1 test map you shown here looked worse to me compared to what source 2 was providing.
maaaaaan, i heard from their developer commentary that they also store directional information in the lights too, so they can do fancy things with baked light
I absolutely LOVE playing HL2 Sourcemods, Undersell, "the closure" (don't judge me!), Dangerous World, Exit, Exit 2, etc. so much fun was had in those worlds. imagining them in Source 2 makes me all tingly
I havened made a map in like a decade, but the news at 13:13 sounds like a gd miracle to me. I absolutely HATED trying to find where in the hell I was getting a leak when I was a babby mapper.
It always amazes me how capable S1 is for how old it is. Sure it does show its age pretty clearly in some areas, but on a whole, you can make some quite spectacular maps with it. I feel confident saying that S2 is/will be the better engine, but it is still a testament to the hard work and forethought of the S1 developers that polished and good looking games can still be created with their engine nearly twenty years after it was developed. I think the middle of the video was a perfect length, it gave all the information clearly and provided good, readable examples of the features you were talking about. I don't think it dragged on at all and I was suitably entertained 🙂
I appreciate the extra effort you went to getting the video no doubt on purpose to 13:37. It made me giggle like a young boy again whenever I would see those numbers in the real world.
I don't think the performance will be dropped too much on Source 2, since the Source 1 with DX9 is poison the performance of modern hardware so much. For example, when War of Tank introduced the DX11, it almost doubled the FPS when compares with the DX9 version, it shows that how DX9 is inefficient. I think the Source 2 ver. CSGO can be made into having similar performance and visual qualities at lowest setting, while having the best graphics that can match the visual qualities of the modern 3A games at the highest setting, just let the player make the decision. I think it would be nice to see ray tracing on the community maps that doesn't need 300 fps+ for the lowest latency, such as the zombie escape maps.
The DX9 only the source engine really affects the performance on the games so I can't wait games like CS:GO getting a major performance boost once it can support DX11 or DX12 from Source 2.
considering that most people who play csgo play on older slower rigs (at least in my region), i'm honestly a bit scared for the game. Just imagine all the russians with shit pc's that barely get 30 fps with lowest settings on source 1 trying to run source 2.
13:15 This is false. Leaks are still a thing in Source 2. While the lighting doesn't break anymore, the leak can cause VIS occlusion problems and dramatically lengthen VIS compile times. Levels still have to be boxed in.
i got a suggestion, do a video on csgo identical plays, you can get footage from majors and compile plays that were identical. maybe im tripping lol but i think it would be pretty cool to watch
Engines in general struggle with darker areas, and it's compounded by RUclips's compression algorithm. There's only many so many shades of grey since shadow maps tend to just be greyscale (0-255).
I think 7:00 is due to a specific number of bounces. I've been working a lot with Bakery in Unity and Blender and I believe this effect is amplified due to the low number of samples and bounces. It is possible that Source 2 limits the number of bounces you can do. In Bakery, it is 5 bounces with 64 samples max, meanwhile, I can do pretty much as many as I want in Blender Cycles (say, 4096 samples and 20 bounces)
Y'know, Valve really needs to open up on an actual non-VR Source 2 SDK at some point. I'm sure finally not being restricted by entity limits or the BSP map architecture will be big changes for modding. Note I said _non-VR,_ I don't want to have to buy a VR headset just to use the engine, y'know?
Valve even said they were going to release the engine and dev tools as a free download, similar to how every other engine does nowadays. But you know... Valve time.
Valve gets around to these things it just takes a long time. there’s literally zero chance they would just neglect to release modding tools for csgo - its the community maps that have kinda carried csgos new content for a while now
As it turns out, source 2 can
Pick up that graphics rendering engine.
@@FlawedbyDesign777and now put it in the game.
pick up that can.
@@FlawedbyDesign777 pick up that optimisation that csgo had
That last part in the cave really shown the improvements from 1 to 2.
this guy knows how to make a video, that totally sold me too. basically "if they don't change anything, nothing changes, but really, everything has changed. cs wont, but could, but wont, but might, and heres how easy different is." genius.
Sauce 1: Ah, props and blocks.
Sauce 2: I want to touch that surface, I want to feel it on my cheek
That cave looked so fucking convincing I am in shock
The cave didn't look very good imo... The rocks jutting out were so shiny you'd think they were covered in oil! I think they should tone it back, as currently I prefer Source 1 after watching this.
@@FinalStooge Everything in the real world has a shine to it to some degree, its what Physically Based Rendering is based on, i suggest you give it a read some time.
I just want an engine that doesn't force map makers to make their maps bland in order for it to actually run properly. As well as fixing all the serious bugs that we have been putting up with for years. Smoke occlusion, objects falling through the map, etc.
Tbf our map makers do kill it. Look at valorants shitty maps.
To be fair, most of those issues are left over from GoldSrc, 90% of the functions used for things in 2007-2013 source branches are just left over because they HAVE to be. Theres so many parameters with entities that don't DO anything in source because they were only used in GoldSrc that had to be forward ported in for functionality-sake.
Source 2, like Source, is just the same skin but with new, better code because Source got so spaghetti coded over the years they genuinely had to start over to not break anything.
@@BURRDAWG_ Yeah Valorant is a real ugly game, but look at what they had to do to Cache to make it not stutter like hell.
Serious Engine entered the chat.
@@Choochinc Yea, RIP cache. It looked so good and they had to kill it. Hopefully source 2 cache will be able to look pretty without the weird lag issues.
What I see in this video is that Source 1 (an engine which will turn 20 yo soon!!) was absolutely ground breaking for its time. Looks stunning even today.
I was about to say that. It's insane how good still looks today.
Yeah even apex legends runs on the source engine
@@akadommy no way
@@Terminated_Account is true
@@Terminated_Account it’s a really modified version tho
"I hope to do more" this pretty much tells me that Phillip is going to attempt to port de_sparity to S2 when it comes out and maybe rework it.
Remaster it call it "re_sparity"
De_fenestration 2 when
I'm excited to see if he's going to port it to prove a point about S1 maps being unsuitable for S2, or if he's going to remake it to prove a point about S2's mapping tools being better.
@@solaris5303 I think he could simply partner with a good artist and focus on reworking the layout as a whole, that would make a great series of videos. He could playtest the new layout with his servers etc...
@@cynicalia this but unironically. HLA’s glass would create the ultimate de_fenestration experience
Small thing about the around 6 minutes mark: Ambient occlusion is only the "shadows in corners" stuff. Light bouncing to other surfaces and carrying colour is called indirect illumination, or more commonly global illumination. AO and skylight are usually included in GI solutions too.
gi automatically has ao because it's simulating indirect light bounces, idk if source 2 applies an extra realtime pass for ao though
@@dissolve5138 It's just how the AO is processed. Source 1 looks like it's just multiplying the result, whereas Source 2 looks like it's using the AO pass to project the colour of adjacent surfaces to simulate light bounces.
@@dissolve5138 I don't think this is true for most real-time renderers-- maybe for a raymarcher, though.
I'd guess that realtime GI, even raytraced, is nowhere near granular/accurate enough to really calculate how much light is contributed to a given pixel in say, in the crevices of a wrinkled jacket. The algorithms are probably focused on the vague contributions of bounce light at a broader scale, lest they be incredibly slow.
I think most modern games still ship with a separate AO step too, but I can't recall.
@@bigguy3123 yes that's basically what i meant, i know the GI is baked but i also said that there is probably a real-time AO pass on top of that
Someone just watched the recent Garbaj video. :D
Source 2 is definetely one of the ones that can, at least in my opinion.
You either meant this as a reply to someone else's comment or forgot to add what you wanted to say here because as it is it makes no sense.
@@ambhaiji look at the title of the video
@@ambhaiji "Can Source 2?" 😃
@@ambhaiji jeez dude...
@@7EEVEE ballz
There's a "GPU Ray Tracing Visualization" mode in S2 Hammer now, it was released in the latest Dota2 update, as well as a "CPU RT Spherical Harmonics" (real time GI). Plus they added or are working on "Meshlet" support (Basically UE5 Nanite).
Meshlet is far from UE5 Nanite and tons of engines have been using it for a long time.
I'd love to see Valve trying to match Unreal Engine 5, like that's ever gonna happen, lmao
The most recent update? Where did you find it, I cant seem to find it :(
No that's closer to Lumen. Nanite is the mesh topography stuff.
TLDR nanite is an autolod system that is extremely well optimized yet still extremely poorly explained
9:17 is a total humblebrag and i'm all for it
11:27 I did not expect those naughty words, bad philip, bad.
It's awesome seeing you make a video about Source 2, as it's becoming more and more relevant to the CS:GO players. I hope we'll see more from you on this topic and perhaps while doing so, you will become one of us - a Source 2 addict.
As for the 7:08 lighting bug, it is usually created when a scene is lit up with low amount of indirect light (generally low-light conditions) that is bounced around by relatively reflective materials. Without changing the lighting conditions, what will help is increasing the lightmap resolution (the Final compile is at 2k quality, but you can go up to 8k).
You can also often encounter a similar bug, where the shadows appear "blobby" - they're not accurate and some parts are darker than they should be, while others are lighter. That happens when you have more than 4 lightsources with "Baked Light Indexing" checked, shining on the same surface - so try to avoid that by unchecking "Baked Light Indexing" for less important lights or by placing the lights in spots where they don't intersect (there's a special "Baked Light Complexity" scene view for that.)
Oh and if you want to enjoy even MORE of cubemaps, there is a way to increase their resolution, by modifying the "EnvironmentMapFaceSize" and "EnvironmentMapRenderSize" values in your gameinfo .gi (located in game>hlvr>).
Alright, I hope you'll have fun with testing the limits of Source 2 and if there's anything, I'd love to help.
Truuuuuu
Those corrected/parallaxed cubemaps gotta be my favorite graphical effect in games. I love all the bokeh and AO etc. and even film grain, but the cubemaps are satisfying to look at when set up like this. Lightweight solution for reflections and such a genius way of doing it. Mirrors in ps2 era games are very cool too. I notice how some games such as RDR2 use three different kinds of reflection types on water together. First there's general low quality cubemap underneath all, then ssr and where ssr isn't visible, there's some low quality looking 3D looking objects being reflected such as simple trees. In between those two effects. Not entirely sure what technique that is but yeah probably just to patch out what ssr can't accomplish and together none of it is barely ever noticeable.
Shhh, don't say you like filmic, cinematic effects. You'll upset triggered gamers.
instead of cubemaps it may be a planar reflection, a limited low quality version of the environment is being rendered through the surface, much cheaper than ray tracing, preserves 3d objects inside of the area and doesn't rely on screeen space data.
@@fxncy2566 I think I recently noticed in Skyrim, the reflections of water are just the low detail map versions of terrain. Yeah it's probably exactly that, then. Smart techniques.
Yes, source 2.
Infact, source 2.
Can source 2 source source source 1? Yes source 2 can source source 1 better than source 1.
what did i just type
Source ? Trust me bro
Indeed, source 2.
sauce too 🍲
Theres a very important thing you missed in the reasons why Source 2 cubemaps look better: Source 2 cube maps are pre-filtered. This means that when they render a cubemap, they use magic light calculations that output several "levels" of blurry reflections. Then, according to the smoothness of the material, it chooses a level from the cubemap that its either blurry, clear, or somewhere in between. This way more rough surfaces that still reflect the world, like smudges, less polished surfaces, etc, show blurry reflections, and clear surfaces shows a clear one.
There is a specific technique I saw on parallax cubemaps that fixes the outdoor sky issue. Weirdly enough I found it on SEGA's Sonic Forces, and havent found other examples, but I believe the technique its also used on Unreal engine. When they render cubemaps, they also save which pixels are actually the sky. When the game shows a reflective surface, when the reflection points to the sky, it swaps from the parallaxed cubemap, to an infinte cubemap thats just the sky. This way both close 3d models and the infinite sky are both perfectly reflected.
That’s really neat
sonic forces for the win baby
Saving which pixels are the sky in a reflection probe is likely done either with the alpha channel, or by storing a cubemap with a depth buffer alongside another cubemap with the color buffer. Saving the depth buffer likely allows for more advanced parallax correction or more accurate shading of the ambient light generated by the reflection probe.
Nice job writing 2 paragraphs on a subject Phillip already said he made a video for.
Theres no magic light calculations, I highly suspect its Gauss blurring the lower(higher) mip levels of the cubemap texture.
Few years ago I was really all for RTX and raytracing stuff but recently I can't help but appreciate the cleaner simplicity of pre-calculated lighting and cubemaps. No muddyness. No AI upscaling. No artifacts. Half Life Alyx is still the most gorgeous thing on my PC.
11:24
"and because its vr it benefits from having loads of piss and shit floating about in the air everywhere"
that actually made me laugh out loud
@@baiborisxd "... because I know it's gonna be fucking painful.'
-Philip, "The Horror of CSGO's Demo Viewer"
@@zed.lmaooo yeah i remember that one
I reset my headphones around 11:46 because i genuinely thought a cord was loose or something 🤣
It's interesting how many big games got caught in development hell due to engine problems in the 2010s: HL Alyx on Source 2, FFXV on Luminous, Cyberpunk on Red engine 4, MGSV on the Fox Engine to name a few.
Any company relying on their own game engine will eventually have to delay games to build a more modern engine
And any company relying on someone else's engine has to hope that that someone will continue to update/improve their engine, or else they will have problems aswell
It seems really stressful to be a game company
This video aged like wine
can confirm CS:GO can source 2 now
EDIT: It turns out the Stanley Parable remake was made in Unity instead of Source. My bad!
About the pre-calculated lighting improvements: I'm pretty sure Stanley Parable was done in Source 1, correct? And its remaster was done in the same engine, right? Yet the new remaster has vastly superior lighting. I was really impressed while playing it. I knew it was pre-baked but the lighting was so cleverly designed, and combined with higher resolution of the shadow maps it looked very moody and effective. It achieved the same effect as raytracing sometimes does, even if the environments and light sources are completely static.
I think the new remaster of stanley parable was made on Unity rather than Source this time
@@Nxbyte Ah, you're right! That's why the lighting looks more modern.
This aged well
I love using parallax corrected cubemaps! In unity they're referred to as "box projected". I remember discovering them back in 2018(ish) when trying to make a map for VRChat and it absolutely blew me away how you can make a simple pre-baked reflection almost look a full proper reflection. That combined with pre-baked lighting and light probes (which allows real-time objects to receive pre-baked lighting, idk if source or source 2 has anything like that) really taught me just how clever games have gotten with emulating raytracing.
Those are all fine & dandy until a scene has objects in them that move, which is the biggest reason raytracing is superior. Still cool to see convincing tricks & try to see how far you can stretch them until they start breaking up.
@@MLWJ1993 Light probes do exist specifically to solve the problem when it comes to moving objects and baked lights but obviously don't work when it comes large, open world maps. Cubemaps + screen space reflections are pretty manky even at the best of times though. Ghostwire with raytracing disabled is basically a masterclass in every place where SSR fails lol
@@sakurasfingernails7247 SSR is the easiest to break anyway, just move the object that's reflected (partially) of screen & done 😆
idk about Source, but Source 2 does use light probes. Also, what about planar reflections? As I understand it, they are more expensive than cubemaps or screen space reflections, but are basically perfect and still much faster than ray tracing.
12:45 Impressive, very nice. Now let's see Paul Allen make a cave.
a
I just love the part of source 2 where it says "it's sourcin time" truly the greatest 2 of all 2's
Ikr and the moment when it sourced all over the screen? Purely iconic
can't wait till valve learns how to count to 3, maybe then we will have the best source, unless they just skip that and make source 4
There is no way it is a coincidence that the video is precisely 13:37 minutes long…
l33t confirmed!!!
wot explain
The source 2 lightning looks way nicer. The light is actually bouncing around and filling the space.
I hope super dark spots *right* next to bright spots are soon to be gone in games (or at least minimized)
You gonnak keep your eyes healthy for longer like that
I haven’t been this excited to fuck around with source game mechanics since your first mapping tutorial series. I can’t wait for the eventual CS update
After watching this video, I feel like watching your Source SDK playlist again. They had a certain charm to them. Great video as always.
can't wait for the source 2 tutorials!
facts
@@btarg1 Same
I really enjoy your informative videos as your explanations really make me feel like I am getting the hang of everything and you've even inspired me to pursue my dreams of creating games when I watched your videos about your games you've made in the past, I also enjoy all the music that's in your videos so I even tried making some of my own, I thought I'd comment this just to show my appreciation as I've been watching you for over 2 years now and I still don't get bored of your content. Keep doing as well as your doing and make sure you enjoy yourself because I enjoy it.
what's the music at 3:08?
The main theme of Operation Flashpoint: Cold War Crysis
Well, this video is soon to become a reality, and im honestly excited
I've listened to Deep in Thought so much while playing Snowrunner that I don't even associate it with your videos anymore. It's an amazing album.
This aged like fine wine
not sure if you watched the fmpone crash course on s2 but if you make a cube map box that extends to the entire level it fixes the outdoor cube map issue, valve does this in alyx
I remember I used to make maps on GoldSource & Source 1... I think I want to learn it again, especially the Source 2.
Source 2 also gives mappers control over the density of light probes which aids with grounding dynamic objects with the static objects. Light probes are light samples taken from different points in space(kinda like a 3d light map). In practice this means physics props, dynamic(animated) props, npcs, and players will blend in much better with the environment(depending on the map of course).
One thing i forgot to mention a couple months ago is the lighting of static props in source 2 is leagues ahead of source 1.
this aged well i think
Watching this video due to several reports of CSGO apparently upgrading to Source 2 - my oh my I'm hyped asf.
Oh my God! Okay! It’s happening! Everybody Stay Calm! Everybody Stay Calm! EVERYBODY STAY FKING CALMMMMMMM
That's an elite video. Can't wait to going back to mapping and making some portal 3 maps!
6 months later and it happened!
Oh my god that indoor parallax cubemap is GORGEOUS.
"Let's look at subtle lighting differences."
RUclips Compression: *How about no.*
those parallax corrected cubemaps are absolutely beautiful!
I'd be really interested how you can squeeze out more performance from Source 2 vs source 1 and how much different graphics APIs (Vulkan vs DX9) can also pull out when on these two engines.
Not really a contest. Vulkan is so much better. In fact, nowadays it's probably recommended to set up dxvk on Windows whenever you can just because it's that much better.
Probably all of CSGO's cpu and single core issues are all DX9 related.
9:18 little quirks like these make me love this channel so much, its so serious yet so funny.
Source 1 compile time bounce lighting can be heavily affected by the $REFLECTIVITY settings in the VMT of the material being hit with a ray, so you can get good results clearing up dark areas by modifying this (it's RGB intensity iirc), perhaps making a duplicate VMT pointing to the same base material but with different reflectivity settings. Or you can just use the old dim floating light entity to mimic what you would expect from a bright light source (e.g Sun) bouncing into a nearby dark tunnel or something. I have to admit, I'm having major trouble understanding how to use Source 2's texturing, and I see some differences in your source 2 version of the map here texture wise I think, too. I'm sure it's much better and more technically "correct" for a modern engine, but I can't seem to hit a groove with it like I can in Source 1. Oh yeah, although CS:GO does have HRTF audio to replace the old surround system\or EAX from older source 1 games, source 2 uses Steam Audio for spatial audio, which I should think would be a lovely audio upgrade in terms of being able to hear exactly where the enemy is around corners. It runs on any OpenCL capable graphics card using Radeon Rays.
Regarding volumetrics etc, these could actually AID gameplay. If a player gets in front of a light source, the volumetrics may help define them at distances or with obstacles in the way, I think? Or fog for players HIDING in intentionally in carefully chosen areas of the map. Convincing material surface shaders might also help with player readability regarding what surfaces act in certain ways, for instance things you can shoot through or break.
BTW, for those that don't know, be careful decreasing lightmap scale in Source 1. It works by subdividing the face into smaller faces, but overlays have a maximum face limit. You may only have an overlay on one face, but if that face has a low lightmap scale, it is effectively many faces, and may hit the limit of how many overlays are allowed on the brush, getting a somewhat unhelpful error when trying to compile that you can't seem to figure out how to fix.
Also, that clip of spyro made me remember how terrible the reignited collection portals are compared to the original. In the original Spyro 1, each portal had a completely separate vertex painting skydome visible only inside the portal frame for the level you were going to. Entering it seamlessly takes the camera inside, loads the level, and has spyro land in the new level without a single fade to black. Reignited just has a blurred cubemap and fades. C'mon, an original playstation with 1MB usable ram did it better :(
Never heard of this light map limit. Source renders many luxels in one tri. You can see this with mat_wireframe 1.
@Гиббон yeah but I don't think luxels are one of them
By the way philip, if you don't know the brighter effect that Source2 has at the beginning is called 'Global Illumination'. And it's pretty much the last hurdle light renderers need to get through to have the standard 'good' lighting
Coming back here after valves 3 videos
I audibly yelped when the cave transferred from S1 to S2. Absolutely insanely good-looking. S2's graphics are absolutely insanely underrated. I haven't heard enough people talking about just how absurdly good it can look.
I feel Portal/2 would work well in Source 2 because the lighting in those games is very important.
I don't know if you've heard of it before or not, but Portal 2: Desolation is a mod that has very similar graphical capabilities. It's S1-based, but they basically rewrote the entire rendering side of the game engine lol
I have not heard of that, I will check it out. Thank you.
The upcoming Portal 1 with RTX looks amazing and proves your point
@@kokojack I was just thinking of this when I saw the comment, great timing
That's Plymouth at 09:16. Nice to see my city being represented in a video! :)
The problem with updating CS:GO to Source 2 is just the simple fact that it requires more resources. With most every game released, most devs don't really care about making their games playable on old hardware, instead making it pretty, needing it to run on modern hardware. Valve is different. They want the game to still be playable for older and less powerful computers, and the community agrees. The backlash Valve faces every time they visually update a map shows that there's still a part of the community that plays on a decade old Integrated Graphics CPU chipset. Just by the example of the size of the maps and the increased load times, a lot of people using this old hardware will raise a fuss about it, because it will impact their ability to run the game in a playable state. Valve wants this game to be playable by everyone, no matter their set-up. It's one of the reason why CS:GO is still popular to this day. Even a decade old laptop could play this game with a little effort. A lot of people that can't play the new Call of Duty or other Triple-A shooter will play CS:GO instead, making the game continue it's steady and huge player base over the years.
Updating to Source 2 would be nice, but the backlash the Valve could get from it just outweigh the benefits of the upgrade. There are still people to this day that complain about Aztec *cough cough*, I mean Ancient, being hard to run for their computers. A great example of this was the downgrades to TF2. Valve intentionally reduced a lot of graphical load, just to make the game more accessible to older hardware. Valve faced a little backlash for it, but the fact that more people being able to play the games, outweighs any outrage by the downgrades.
Source 2 doesn't necessarily require more resources, but it might require newer resources. Newer engines tend to do things more efficiently, but then in the product are also tuned to produce much better graphics which increases resource use.
Your entire comment is also one of the main reasons why Valve said they're hesitant about offering 128 tick official matchmaking servers.
Good point! I think they're driven mostly by their business interest: when game is playable for more people with old hardware, more people will bring them money by buying skins and using casino cases. This way even poor fellas from developing countries will be interested in doing so. That's why I think Source 2 maps will not differ so much from Source 1 ones, as they will try to keep performance more or less the same.
This is the last channel I expected to see Hydrophobia gameplay on
valve says that counter strike 2 will be released with the source 2 engine. cant wait for phillip to make a video about it.
Entropy: Zero 2 makes heavy use of the parallax corrected cubemaps, despite it being a Source 1 mod. And it looks really impressive.
I really hope Valve makes Source 2 easy for wide use. I would love to see more games on other engines besides UE. Hell I’d love to make a source 2 game as well.
For some reason I forget that I have alredy liked the video while watching it, so when Im realising that I'm really enjoying the video I try to like it once again. I reliked this video 3 times =)
Honestly, Source 1 is still impressive considering it launched in 2003. Source 2 is a general improvement
@ordinary name and plays. I imagine that it could have released yesterday and still be praised
"source 1 is darker than source 2, and it doesn't match even if you increase the brightness" - Dude, you were using different hdri to light the maps (city x cloudy day), of course they are going to be different
Holy... Philip you explain the cubemap part so well! I've known what cubemaps were for so long yet the way source 2 tackles it and the entire google earth explanation.. I had no idea.. Seriously, this may be a weird part I'm stuck on yet I'm really impressed.
Also I love all the suggestions in this list. It makes me think of something like a source 2 "mythbusting" or "fun facts" series of videos. Or even just full on source 2 mapping tutorials, including how you managed to get a first-person camera, loading HL:A maps and assets, etc.
How is the song called at 10:25? And where can i find it?
PBR materials and higher resolution lightmaps really do wonders to how things look.
Just looking at some of the maps and assets created for modern quake ports that support PBR, HDR lightmaps and realtime lighting there is a huuuuge difference even when compared to high resolution texture replacements using the old shader format (or lack thereof).
This comment only comes out of a place in my heart for you, I absolutely loved this video and damn those Corrected cube maps do look like ray traced reflections however, I almost felt like you did not sell the first example comparison as well as you could have. The Source 2 baked lighting looks really good, it immediately reminded me of the ray tracing shader in Minecraft and that is high praise. Although I have been aware of the fact that Source 1 uses ray tracing to bake the lightning it just never looked like Ray tracing to me, it is very inaccurate and limited however with Source 2 even with its stock settings it looked very convincing, and I dont understand how you thought that just brightening up the Source 1 map made it comparable, that is strange coming from you. Even the most amped up Source 1 test map you shown here looked worse to me compared to what source 2 was providing.
maaaaaan, i heard from their developer commentary that they also store directional information in the lights too, so they can do fancy things with baked light
11:54 My name is Jeff
11:25 - 11:54 my fucking SIDES dude! They hurt! 😂
This has aged like a fine wine
I absolutely LOVE playing HL2 Sourcemods, Undersell, "the closure" (don't judge me!), Dangerous World, Exit, Exit 2, etc.
so much fun was had in those worlds. imagining them in Source 2 makes me all tingly
With hindsight? Yes.
I keep rewatching your videos, a testament about their quality
I havened made a map in like a decade, but the news at 13:13 sounds like a gd miracle to me. I absolutely HATED trying to find where in the hell I was getting a leak when I was a babby mapper.
@silverGabeNeyes We are all babby, even now. Just a bunch of naked apes trying to entertain ourselves when we're not worried about surviving.
In 5 years games will be 100% photorealistic and S2 will be updated so much, that nobody will notice anything.
It always amazes me how capable S1 is for how old it is. Sure it does show its age pretty clearly in some areas, but on a whole, you can make some quite spectacular maps with it. I feel confident saying that S2 is/will be the better engine, but it is still a testament to the hard work and forethought of the S1 developers that polished and good looking games can still be created with their engine nearly twenty years after it was developed.
I think the middle of the video was a perfect length, it gave all the information clearly and provided good, readable examples of the features you were talking about. I don't think it dragged on at all and I was suitably entertained 🙂
iirc the first titanfall was still built off of the source engine. Not sure about Titanfall 2 or Apex though.
@@queuedjar4578 pretty sure they're also heavily modified Source 1.
I appreciate the extra effort you went to getting the video no doubt on purpose to 13:37. It made me giggle like a young boy again whenever I would see those numbers in the real world.
Everyone always asks can source 2? but not how is source 2?
whoo source 2 and video length 13:37 nice
hearing philip swear is just ugh - its painful. its like hearing your primary/elementary teacher swearing
What song did he use for the last segment it’s very good
looks like 3kliks joined our source 2 conspiracy club, welcome 😞🙏
7:44 love his eager voice here
I don't think the performance will be dropped too much on Source 2, since the Source 1 with DX9 is poison the performance of modern hardware so much. For example, when War of Tank introduced the DX11, it almost doubled the FPS when compares with the DX9 version, it shows that how DX9 is inefficient. I think the Source 2 ver. CSGO can be made into having similar performance and visual qualities at lowest setting, while having the best graphics that can match the visual qualities of the modern 3A games at the highest setting, just let the player make the decision. I think it would be nice to see ray tracing on the community maps that doesn't need 300 fps+ for the lowest latency, such as the zombie escape maps.
The DX9 only the source engine really affects the performance on the games so I can't wait games like CS:GO getting a major performance boost once it can support DX11 or DX12 from Source 2.
considering that most people who play csgo play on older slower rigs (at least in my region), i'm honestly a bit scared for the game. Just imagine all the russians with shit pc's that barely get 30 fps with lowest settings on source 1 trying to run source 2.
@@TheLazar876 win - win
@@Emil.torsti not really, russians will play even with 10 fps which would ruin the games quality even more
0:30 this finger in hand scene is exactly the vibe i come here for
13:15 This is false. Leaks are still a thing in Source 2. While the lighting doesn't break anymore, the leak can cause VIS occlusion problems and dramatically lengthen VIS compile times. Levels still have to be boxed in.
interesting
I lived in Plymouth for 3 years and it's always nostalgic seeing it show up on this channel
source 2 is definitely one of the game engines
i got a suggestion, do a video on csgo identical plays, you can get footage from majors and compile plays that were identical. maybe im tripping lol but i think it would be pretty cool to watch
8:11 and it has 10x the file size lol
What a legend only one ad in the beginning . Your so damn underrated
Gone are the days where devs are super limited in resources and have to find unique workarounds for low specs. Now it's just bloat.
This feels like an AD for source 2
Those comparison images seem really compressed with visible color banding
That's the lightmap itself that has the color banding. Source doesn't have a lot of color depth in its lightmaps.
Engines in general struggle with darker areas, and it's compounded by RUclips's compression algorithm. There's only many so many shades of grey since shadow maps tend to just be greyscale (0-255).
@@AnUncleanHippy How bad is this effect in actual HDR?
13:00 Source 1:Honda Civic
Source 2:GAZ 24
13:37 We see what you did there 3kliksphilip, good old leet 1.6 days :)
I think 7:00 is due to a specific number of bounces. I've been working a lot with Bakery in Unity and Blender and I believe this effect is amplified due to the low number of samples and bounces. It is possible that Source 2 limits the number of bounces you can do. In Bakery, it is 5 bounces with 64 samples max, meanwhile, I can do pretty much as many as I want in Blender Cycles (say, 4096 samples and 20 bounces)
Y'know, Valve really needs to open up on an actual non-VR Source 2 SDK at some point. I'm sure finally not being restricted by entity limits or the BSP map architecture will be big changes for modding. Note I said _non-VR,_ I don't want to have to buy a VR headset just to use the engine, y'know?
Valve even said they were going to release the engine and dev tools as a free download, similar to how every other engine does nowadays. But you know... Valve time.
Why not both? Vr compatibility does not mean desktop incompatibility.
Although how to aquire source 2 is still an issue I guess.
Valve gets around to these things it just takes a long time. there’s literally zero chance they would just neglect to release modding tools for csgo - its the community maps that have kinda carried csgos new content for a while now
Nice showcase of S2's details and enviromental lighting. Btw, whats the song playing at 4:10?
beautiful video with a beautiful run time
I'm honestly kinda excited for Source 2 CSGO