Late last night yesterday, Valve released an update for their hugely popular team shooter CSS. The major aspect of this patch updated the engine used to a later version of Source, the one used by Team Fortress 2 and Half Life 2: Episode 2, that’s a lot of two’s. This new engine gives the game the framework for achievements, kill cams, dominations, and statistics a lot like (exactly like) TF2. In addition to this, it improves the visuals of the game, in particular the shading, which now has full HDR lighting which does make the game look gorgeous, especially in the outdoor maps, though at a slight frame rate drop. Gameplay aside from that is unchanged, and Valve have done a good job in making sure not to alter the feel or power of the guns.

Of course, the engine is also compatible with the Mac OSX, which doesn’t affect PC gamers a whole lot unless you also have a Mac (or a Macbook), apart from giving us some ‘noobs to pwn’ (sorry). The statistics recorded are very detailed, including which maps you’re best on, which guns you are most accurate with, number of windows you’ve shot out, et-cetera, which could prove interesting once you’ve been playing a while and racked up a large amount of data. There are 144 new achievements added, ranging from getting a number of kills with each gun, winning rounds, and earning money, most of which are achievable through normal gameplay, except maybe one which has you and 4 friends on the same server buy the same loadout.

Most of the community seem to be receiving the patch positively, with the occasional 12 year old yelling at Valve for destroying their game. Most changes don’t affect gameplay at all, and most of the additions can be turned off in the server config, including kill cams and dominations (and most servers I’ve been on turn kill cams off). Valve’s usual perfection has been swept aside for some reason when creating the GUI for the new menus, but that’s only a minor point.

A few real negative points to the update come in the fact that the updated engine has reduced frames by a rather large percentage for some players on lesser specced machines, which is a fair complaint. Even with the new HDR lighting turned off, people are reporting losses of up to 50% FPS, presumably because they have an ancient graphics card that can’t handle the new shaders. I couldn’t say for certain the performance loss I’ve had, but it’s still running comfortably at over 150 most of the time so I’m not complaining.

Finally, the updated engine has broken all surf servers for the time being, because of the small changes to the physics used, on which surf was so reliant. I’m unaware if this is permanent or a workaround could be found, which is a shame because I did like a quick game of surf now and again. Other mods such as GunGame should be working fine with possibly a quick update.

A fantastic update then, thanks Valve. We can but wonder which game is next on Valve’s update list, Half Life 2: Deathmatch perhaps? Oh, and CSS is 66% off for two days, but I hope nobody still needs to buy it *evil look*.

Update: It seems like Surf servers are back, though they don’t feel as fast as before.