Counter-Strike: Global Offensive engine branch

The Counter-Strike: Global Offensive engine branch was introduced in 2012 with the release of Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. It is the latest Source 1 engine branch available and succeeds the Portal 2 engine branch.

It is also no longer being updated with the release of Counter-Strike 2, but remains maintained for third-party games that use CS:GO branch.

Note:This engine branch has been upgraded over time, so some games or mods on this engine branch may not have all of these features. Many features are exclusive to Counter-Strike: Global Offensive.

Note: Dota 2 used to be the latest Source 1 branch available, but as of 2015 Reborn update, which upgraded the game to Source 2, this makes CS:GO as the latest Source 1 branch available.

Features

New since the Portal 2 engine branch is:

FXAA anti-aliasing

Simple at the cost of image quality, but are much faster than other anti-aliasing method, such as MSAA.

FXAA can be also used with MSAA (such as 2X) at the same time. This will benefits most lower-end PC that struggles to run MSAA 4X or higher.

Real-time dynamic shadows

env_cascade_light provides dynamic, high-resolution cascade shadow mapping for the outdoor light of light_environment.

Lightmapped Ambient Occlusion

VRAD can now bake ambient occlusion into the lightmaps for a map, leading to enhanced realism.

Bump mapped decals

LightmappedGeneric decals now support bump maps.

Newer Features

Phong reflections on Lightmapped materials

LightmappedGeneric and WorldVertexTransition now support diffuse Phong reflections.

Vertex lighting for bumpmapped static props

Static props with bump maps can now receive vertex lighting, better blending them into the environment. All static props also now receive better lighting.

Anisotropic reflection emulation

Brush shaders can now emulate anisotropic specular reflections using new parameters.

Bump map blending for LightmappedGeneric

Two bump maps can now be blended together for high-frequency and low-frequency bumpmap variation on the LightmappedGeneric shader.

Lightmapped_4WayBlend

A displacement shader that can blend four different materials together by luminance.

Prop combination

VBSP now supports combining selected static props during map compilation, increasing performance and lowering draw calls.

Increased engine and compilier limits

The engine now supports more entities, more models and more displacements.

Note:Document all of the increased limits.

New first-person weapon lighting.

First-person weapon view now support more detailed lighting.

Static prop scaling

Other improvements

Todo: Document these, this is just the tip of the iceberg.

Todo: Celisej: soon add more.

Availability

• Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (delisted)
• Insurgency (earlier version)
• Day of Infamy (earlier version)
• Half-Life 2: Remastered (unreleased)

Confirm:While this game is currently unreleased, and not announced yet, it's most likely based off CS:GO branch heavily modified (according to SteamDB when viewing the Review_Build depot files) to include support for HL2 entities as it's contain some graphic features that can be only found in L4D engine branch and later (EKV files, replacing the old DirectX Versions system), Panorama/Qt UI, more...

• Jabroni Brawl: Episode 3
• Military Conflict: Vietnam
• Operation: Black Mesa

A third-party, heavily modified version of this engine, called Strata Source, is also available, and it is used on the following games:

• Portal 2: Community Edition
• Momentum Mod
• Portal: Revolution

Source code for these branches is not available. However, authoring tools exist for custom content.

• Counter-Strike: Global Offensive Authoring Tools