Valve yesterday released Counter-Strike 2 in a closed beta run to a select group of people. It has been a long time since there was anything announced like this but I think we all saw it coming.

The existing Source Engine that powers CSGO is still running on x86 and the graphic capabilities are long dated.

Despite being a closed beta, I was unable to obtain access through official channels. It seems that the developers are primarily granting access to those who actively play the game, and unfortunately, I have not been. However I managed to get a copy of the game files and it runs fine in an offline capability with steam_api64.dll patched.

From my brief play yesterday it seems to run pretty smooth and it’s good to see finally we have some more modern graphic settings to play around with.

I did find the bots though are really stupid and sometimes they just stand there and stare at you. They also made changes to the smoke grenades. When you throw a smoke now it actually looks more volumetric and fills the space around it. When you shoot through it now it also changes in shape and form.

Source 2 & Reverse Engineering

Lets be real you’re probably more interested in this section rather than my ‘review’ or ’thoughts’ on CS2. I have, of course, briefly examined the new engine. A while back, I had bookmarked an excellent blog post by praydog titled An Analysis of the Source 2 Engine. This post served as an introduction to how the Schema System works in Source 2. I plan to develop some tools to facilitate the development process for CS2, which I will share on my Github at a later date.

It seems from a brief glance that they have cleaned up a lot of the classes as previously for example if you wanted to read the player name you would need to grab it from the radar struct. Now that conveniently sits inside the CBasePlayerController.

More content to come.