A brief overview of Counterstrike Source
All gamers will have heard of Counterstrike and Half Life. Not just the old engine, but the new source engine. The titles are a landmark of online gaming and game servers.
Counter-Strike Source in the early days
Counter Strike rolled off the development line way back in June 1999 as a mod to Half Life. In 2000, Valve chose to retail the mod. The game had 19 beta releases until version 1 was made available. After all that, there followed 7 big updates to the game, the upgrade from version 1.5 to 1.6 being the biggest.
CS servers run from STEAM
Many people believed that this update ruined the game as 1.6 was only released on Steam. Even after 2004, when WON was shut off, there are still players on 1.5. Some would say they just dont want to buy a legal copy of the game. Like all good games this carried the ability to add custom content like: new maps, mods, sounds and graphics to it to change the game play. Still now, there is a large group developing maps and mods for Counterstrike game servers. This shows exactly how popular Counterstrike Source gaming servers still remain.
Valve also released Counter Strike Condition dubbed as CS:CZ in 2004. This was a slightly facelift version of the game but still ran on the now 6 year old Goldsource engine. This was based on a modification of the Quake II engine and did not have the success that was expected with only 2.9 million retail sales of the game as of December 2008 compared to the 4.2 million by the end of the same period.
Introducing source game servers
When Valve released Half Life 2 in November 2004, this also saw the release of Counterstrike Source, also known as CSS. This version now had the same level of graphics of other games for its age and so was making older PCs struggle to run the game. Half Life Episode One, also brought a new release to the Source Engine in 2006. With the original engine needing a reasonable powerful pc for the time did mean that it took a while for people to start getting into CSS. However, once you play CS Source, you dont stop. CS Source also had more ability to modify the game.
Hax, cheaters and Counterstike Servers
Since the first version, CS has always had problems with cheaters on Counterstrike Source game servers. VAC is a popular deterrant, although its not foolproof. Which is Steam Bans works well- an organisation that works on submissions from clan server admins. By far the best deterrent has to be a good server admin on the clan server itself. However it is just unrealistic to have admins on their servers 24/7. Which is why we have recently seen a lot of scripts that automatically kick and ban hackers.
As we write this, we arent quite sure on the history of Counterstrike. The Battlefield series and COD games have taken a lot of players away from CSS.
We will have to wait and see what Valve do!
