Prize Pools and Engine Upgrades - Counter-Strike: Global Offensive

[-smash-]

As if Operation Wildfire and the new de_nuke update weren't enough, this week has brought two more big pieces of news on the Global Offensive front.


$1,000,000 PRIZE POOL FOR MAJOR CHAMPIONSHIP

In a recent blog post, Valve announced that, starting with the MLG Columbus 2016 championship, each CS:GO Major Championship prize pool will be increased from $250,000 to $1,000,000.

As HLTV.org has pointed out, "the initially crowd-funded events have featured a $250,000 prize pool since their inception at the end of 2013, with 7 such tournaments having taken place so far."

MLG have also revealed the distribution of the prize pool money to the 16 teams that participate, and it goes as:

• 1. $500,000
• 2. $150,000
• 3-4. $70,000
• 5-8. $35,000
• 9-16. $8,750

MLG Columbus 2016 will take place March 29th - April 3rd in Columbus, Ohio. The final qualifying round for the remaining 8 teams to move on to MLG Columbus takes place this week, February 26th - 28th.


LIGHTING AND SHADER IMPROVEMENTS

And with the introduction of the update to de_nuke, Valve have added a number of upgrades to CS:GO's lighting and shader systems. As described on CS:GO's Workshop summary page, the main improvements are:

• Lighting Improvements
  • Static Prop Model Lighting Improvements
  • Displacement Surface Lighting Improvements
  • Normal Mapped Static Prop Lighting Improvements
  • Cascade Shadow Maps (CSMs)
• New Shader Features
  • Phong Specular highlights on Lightmapped Materials
  • 2nd UV set support for Decals
  • Normal Map Blending
  • Anisotropic reflection emulation
  • Cubemap Lighting Influence
  • Drop Shadows and Highlights on Displacement Blends
  • $notint
• Hammer Editor Improvements
  • Modularity

One of the coolest updates, in my opinion, is the upgrade to Hammer. Valve says that they've increased the memory available to Hammer, and so this allows for things like better support for modularity of assets. For instance, assets are now more flexible in that they can be interconnected with each other, and they can contain multiple surface types (or skins). As Valve puts it, "the idea being that we only need to build one prop set that can be re-used in an almost infinite number of scenarios."

All of these improvements are now available in the CS:GO SDK - for free!

 

[tomemozok]

Sooo... No Source 2 for cs yet... Nor a fix for that dreadfull thing they call ui that lacks basic funcionality that dota 2 has had for years?...

 

[Skyace65]

kinda odd to add improvements to source 1 instead of source 2

 

[Ennui]

Glad Valve has finally decided to show a little love for CSGO - the 250k prize pool at Valve sponsored majors has long been a major complaint of the CSGO community when you compare it to how much they've spent on Dota tournaments.

 

[-smash-]

kinda odd to add improvements to source 1 instead of source 2

It is. But I have a feeling that these are Source 2's improvements and they're being back-ported to Source 1. Hopefully we'll see a fully Source 2 port of CS:GO, though. It's going to last as long as Dota 2, so it would make sense to do that at some point.

Glad Valve has finally decided to show a little love for CSGO - the 250k prize pool at Valve sponsored majors has long been a major complaint of the CSGO community when you compare it to how much they've spent on Dota tournaments.

And it's nice that it's a constant $1 mil. Because with the Compendium, for example, the prize pool at some point might decline.