Creating a Classic Counter-Strike Map

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This page covers the Classic Game Modes of Counter-Strike: Source and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive as well as map requirements.

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Game Mode Description

The game consists of rounds with a maximum duration. The ways that a round can be won is defined by the map's scenario.

The default scenario is the Elimination Mission. The other two extend the default scenario and eliminate drawn rounds.

Elimination Mission Before match start, there is a warmup period with player respawns. For warmup arenas, see Setting up 1v1 Warmup Arenas. At the beginning of each round, the players spawn at a spawn point of their team. Each round starts with a freezetime where players can neither move nor shoot. Its duration in seconds is set with the ConVar mp_freezetime. During the freezetime, the players can purchase weapons and equipment. After the freezetime, players can move and shoot. Round-ending objectives are elimination and timeout (draw). Players earn money by winning/losing rounds and by getting kills.

Bomb Defusal - basicly an Elimination Mission, but: Round-ending objectives are bomb explosion (Ts win), bomb defusal (CTs win), elimination and timeout (CTs win). There are no drawn rounds. Terrorists must plant a bomb (weapon_c4) at a bomb site (func_bomb_target) and wait for it to explode, Counter-Terrorists must stop them from doing so. All players are notified if a bomb has been planted. Players also earn money by planting or defusing the bomb.

Hostage Rescue - basicly an Elimination Mission, but: Round-ending objectives are hostage rescue (CTs win), elimination and timeout (Ts win). There are no drawn rounds. Counter-Terrorists must reach and rescue hostages (hostage_entity) by bringing them to a Rescue Zone (func_hostage_rescue), Terrorists must stop them from doing so. If there are no hostages left, CTs win if they have rescued at least 50 % of all hostages, otherwise the round continues. Bug: For the 50 % calculation, the game fails to regard hostages that were killed before the last rescue of the round. This implies that rescuing the last remaining hostage always wins the round for CTs. Killing it always wins if the previous was rescued (not killed). Killing the remaining N hostages wins if the previous was rescued and if at least N hostages have already been rescued.  [todo tested in ?] CTs win as soon as they have rescued one hostage. Players also earn money by reaching and rescuing hostages.

Note: These scenarios are also played in Demolition and Guardian but with certain deviations from this descriptions. See also: CS:GO Game Mode Commands.

Map Requirements

A map definitely requires the following to be able to play any classic game mode.

Spawn Points

Spawn points and buy zones

Create entities and change their classname to either info_player_terrorist or info_player_counterterrorist. This is where players will spawn.

Main article:  info_player_terrorist

On official maps, the spawn points of each team are not spread among the map but close together in one area. The two spawn areas are usually placed opposite each other on the map and should not be visible to each other.

In Classic Competitive, there are only 5 players on each team. In Classic Casual game mode, there are up to 10 players on each team.
It is a good idea to include 16 spawn points for each team, to work with 32 player servers, otherwise 5-10 are also sufficient.

Warning: If you get The T/CT team is full. error, then it is probably because you either placed no spawn points for that team, or all of them are invalid. See info_player_terrorist.

Tip: If only some of the spawn points shall be used for say 5v5, increase the Spawn Priority (int) keyvalue for all other spawn points. The former are used first, latter are only used if needed.

Buyzones

Create a brush so that all spawn points of a team are touching it, texture it with the tools/toolstrigger texture and tie it to an entity by pressing Ctrl+T. Change the entity class to func_buyzone and set the Team Number (int) keyvalue (TeamNum) to the appropriate team. This decides which teams are able to open the buy menu while touching the previously created trigger volume.

Do this for the spawn areas of both teams.

Map Objectives

A map already works until here, just that it is only an Elimination Mission, meaning that a round can only be won by eliminating the entire enemy team, otherwise the round is drawn. A disadvantage of this is that this encourages passive gameplay to not risk losing the round. To avoid this, there are map objectives so that there is a winning team if the time runs out; This encourages active gameplay for the other team.

You should decide for one of the following:

Main article:  Creating a Bomb Defusal Map

Main article:  Creating a Hostage Rescue Map

Competitive Aspects

• The time that players need to reach bomb sites or hostages influences their winning chances, so the spawn point placement can severely impact map balance and can make choke points (meeting points) very engaging.
• Random spawns may not be desirable to some players, but can work on some maps. For example, players on the Terrorist's team on de_dust2 can have a good spawn for B or for A long.
• Hostages are located closer to the Terrorist's spawn area so that they can get into a defensive position before Counter-Terrorists arrive.

Placement Tip: The room of each map objective should require two entrances; Mostly, cover is set up at a bomb site so that a player can watch one entrance while being covered from the other.

Testing

You can test your map by launching it with the map <mapname> command.

Tip: All classic game modes use game_type 0 and game_mode 0-3. To quickly load a map in the right one, you can invoke one of the following:

• map <mapname> casual
• map <mapname> competitive
• map <mapname> scrimcomp2v2 (Wingman)
• map <mapname> scrimcomp5v5 (Weapons Expert)

Miscellaneous

Map Prefix

The map prefix is just a naming convention.^[confirm]

The scenario name that is displayed in the loading screen depends only on the prefix of the map file.

Map Prefix	Example Filename	Scenario Name in Loading Screen
cs_	cs_office.bsp	Hostage Scenario Mission
de_	de_dust2.bsp	Bomb Scenario Mission
none of the above	test.bsp	Elimination Scenario

Further Game Modes

There are more game modes such as Wingman, Deathmatch, Retakes, or Guardian that can also be played on classic competitive maps and that only need some (map) adjustments. For a list of all game modes and more, see CSGO Game Mode Commands.

See also

• How To Develop A Map That Works
• Creating a working mini-map
• Nav Mesh Editing - Make bots work (better) and add Place Names
• mapname.txt - Display custom text when loading your map
• Choosing Player Models - Creating <game>/maps/<mapname>.kv
• Publishing Your Map to the Steam Workshop