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Met what ended up being a great friend in real life somewhere in some random IRC room looking for a 5th member to join my friend's group He had a special CRT m

Met what ended up being a great friend in real life somewhere in some random IRC room looking for a 5th member to join my friend's group He had a special CRT monitor to get the best refresh rate to be as competitive as possible for the game Feels like a lifetime ago

Waterluvian 4y ago
I was always amused by how many of my friends got crazy monitors but still just used headphones. Surround sound for 1.6 made the game incredibly unfair. Being able to hear specifically in what direction and volume footsteps were coming from was basically a wallhack. I would often use headphones because parents weren't the biggest fans of hours of that a night, and it was so crippling. Funny enough, my semi-pro career (I made $60 total) ended when I abandoned my surround sound when moving out in undergrad.
- saiya-jin 4y ago
  Friend painted dot in the center of his screen with permanent marker for sniper rifles, especially strongest one became 1-off shotgun. We hated him for that
- r9550684 4y ago
  sound blaster at some point allowed you to emulate exaggerated "3d sound" polyphony. I distinctly remember a control panel, where you could drag around surround sound speakers and it would attempt to emulate them in headphones.
- MuffinFlavored 4y ago
  > but still just used headphones I haven't thought of Ventrilo/Teamspeak in years...
  - Waterluvian 4y ago
    Ohhhh right that reminded me of another anecdote: sound cancellation wasn't really a working tech back then so my Vent buddies hated hearing my game. I would have a little earbud in connected to Vent on my other computer so I could hear them, but they'd always hear my game, so I ended up developing this half-assed skill of speaking only during quiet times.
    - totoglazer 4y ago
      Ventrillo, a voice chat program popular for gamers. I guess sort of 2002 era Discord.
      - rightbyte 4y ago
        Like Discord but with like 10ms latency to your friends in the area and no fancy pancy filters adding group delay when you speak. Overall a way superior experience to what we have today. I remember having actual effortless conversations on Ventrilo. Nowadays speaking in Discord or MS Teams or what ever is exhausting since you interrupt each other due to the delay. Phones have also gotten worse. It would be interesting to see a number of round trip "ping" for different Voip providers and phone systems ...
    - hackernewds 4y ago
      What is a vent
      - Waterluvian 4y ago
        Vent aka. Ventrilo was a group voice chat application from about 20 years ago. You'd log into a server and have different "chat rooms" to be in, and it was voice-centric (and text to speech and many other features).
        anthk 4y ago
        Like Mumble?
- kentonv 4y ago
  Weird. My experience has always been that headphones are more effective at producing precise 3D sound than speakers. And intuitively, it seems like they should, because they can feed each ear with exactly the sound that ear should hear. That said it does require that the game has good 3D sound generation, which isn't trivial, especially differentiating front and back which requires accounting for the shape of the human ear.
  - Waterluvian 4y ago
    You generally need special headphones for that and they really didn't work that well 20 years ago. I don't recall there being any way to tell the Half Life engine or my sound card "output 6 channels to the headphones" and the engine wouldn't do A3D if it was a stereo device. By having a 5.1 setup surrounding me (about 2 feet away in each direction, it was.. cluttered), the brain produces a surround sound effect the way it does in normal life. An expert would have to speak further about how headphones can emulate that, but I don't recall it ever really being a thing in the early 2000s.
    - kentonv 4y ago
      I have a vivid memory of playing Doom 2 on a 486 in the 90's, hiding in a building with a cyberdemon circling around the outside, and being able to tell exactly where he was based on sound alone. Needless to say Doom produced no more than 2 channels of audio. Interestingly Doom's audio code was licensed from a third party. When they open sourced it, they had to rewrite that part; I think Carmack said he backported Quake's code. I wonder if that third-party code was just really good or something.
      - deadbunny 4y ago
        I had the same experience with doom 2; heard an Imp fireballing me directly behind me so perfectly I spun around in my chair.
    - rzzzt 4y ago
      The Sierra version of Half-Life had EAX support, IIRC, with strangely long reverberations each time you walked on something made out of metal. claaang
- dopeboy 4y ago
  Is this true? I used headphones all throughout my CS days. Stereo sound in headphones was enough to give a competitive advantage.
- __alexs 4y ago
  You only have ~2 ears, there is no need for 5.1 channel surround sound.
  - peepee1982 4y ago
    Hearing is more involved than taking sensory input from two sources. If it weren't, there wouldn't be mixing and mastering engineers using speakers. Which they mainly do.
    - voxic11 4y ago
      Pretty sure they use speakers because they are mastering primarily for speaker setups. Not because it increases the accuracy of location information encoded in the sound.
      - peepee1982 4y ago
        Nope. Because headphones don't give you sound pressure fluctuations in your body, and because the depth (not width!) perception is all messed up when using headphones.
    - jacobsenscott 4y ago
      Give this a go, with headphones https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4BltHXngvlk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4BltHXngvlk
      - peepee1982 4y ago
        Yeah, it's a lot better than without the transfer function. It just doesn't react to my head movements, which speakers do (by staying stationary relative to my head)
        jacobsenscott 4y ago
        Sure, but your screen doesn't move, so your head doesn't move much either.
- dbttdft 4y ago
  You already get 99% of that "wallhack" by having stereo headphones. The game is mostly flat.
  - Waterluvian 4y ago
    For casual level play it’s indeed fine. But the “flatness” of a level doesn’t really mean much. You want to know which specific part of a nearby room someone is in. To the left… in front? Behind? Are they going through the hallway or cellar in cs_italy? Like any game, you get huge value out of slight advantages when you get to the more high level skill.
    - justsomehnguy 4y ago
      >cs_italy FYI there are AMA thread from makers of it on Reddit somewhere. A quite fun read.
    - Hikikomori 4y ago
      You can just move the mouse horizontally slightly and you'll know the direction of the sound instantly. Stereo is not for casual play, it's clearly the opposite as here's not a single professional player that uses surround to my knowledge.
    - least 4y ago
      I was around CAL-M level in 1.6 and I never had a surround sound setup, but I'm unconvinced that it has any meaningful benefit over headphones, which worked perfectly fine for intuiting where someone was. That's hardly a real benefit in higher level play, anyway because you know where everyone could be, anyway, and your movement is dictated by that knowledge as well.
- ceedan 4y ago
  Surround sound was unnecessary. As long as you had stereo headphones you were fine. I had cheap headphones, expensive headphones and even won headphones at LAN events. Directional audio was never an issue on any headset I'd played with. I tested them all with this video - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IUDTlvagjJA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IUDTlvagjJA The only headphone issue I had in my decades of playing CS were with open ear headphones (Sennheiser HD555) that reduced the punchiness of bass and made footsteps more difficult to hear in CSS which was a terrible game with terrible audio.
- Hikikomori 4y ago
  How many pro CSGO players use surround?
  - dvlsg 4y ago
    Pro players almost definitely all use headphones, because they're typically on stage for tournaments with their teammates right next to them and their opponents somewhere nearby. But even when they're not on stage, they're often in the same room with their teammates. And even if that isn't the case for some reason and a player is in their own room, winning those tournaments is generally the highest honor, so pro players would likely want to practice as close to tournament conditions anyways. Directional audio over headphones is surprisingly good nowadays, though. HRTF is pretty cool stuff.
    - Hikikomori 4y ago
      And because surround is mostly useless, if not messing up sound. With stereo all you need is to move your mouse horizontally to locate the exact direction of any sound.
      - dvlsg 4y ago
        Yeah, for sure. There are other considerations as well - if game sound is coming over loud speakers, you run the risk of it also being picked up by your microphone when you try to communicate with your teammates.
- krolden 4y ago
  I have no problem sondhacking with my 2.1 setup.
- sC3DX 4y ago
  audio spatialization has gotten really fancy in games. We can trick your eat into thinking sounds are coming from any direction with a combination of filters, delays, attenuations, etc. Of course it's not as good as the real thing but it is still very convincing (and certainly good enough to be competitive in CS these days).
  - MonaroVXR 4y ago
    I figured this out already with speakers and definitely with headphones.
Zurrrrr 4y ago
"He had a special CRT monitor to get the best refresh rate to be as competitive as possible for the game" People like that always trying to compensate for a lack of skill
- ackatz 4y ago
  Meanwhile all of the best players in the world are using 240hz monitors…
  - Zurrrrr 4y ago
    I didn't say refresh rate didn't matter. Buy buying a new CRT in the late 90s with a slightly better refresh rate isn't going to be much of an advantage.
    - nrb 4y ago
      The difference was pretty drastic. My NEC FP2141SB in the early 2000s ran 1280x1024 @ 100hz, those Diamondtron/Tronitron tubes were next-level for their time even though they were super finicky.
      - dbttdft 4y ago
        Yeah the range of CRT quality was huge and visible. Those were a type of product where price actually correlated to quality. With an LCD you could pay $1000 for a "gaming" model and still get something that has basic issues like high input lag or strong overshoot. With CRT it meant the screen is now flat, the image is now bigger than 17", and the focus is now sharper.
  - kcb 4y ago
    Most of them purposely gimp themselves by running in 4:3. I've watched major tournament losses due to pro players not being able to spot someone they would if they were running widescreen.
    - 4y ago
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
glonq 4y ago
I know a couple that got married after meeting in CS1.6 Wild!
gt565k 4y ago
Was scouring ebay back in the day for those samsung CRT monitors that could get 100+hz on 800x640 resolution so I can frag like a pro gamer :D

Waterluvian 4y ago

I was always amused by how many of my friends got crazy monitors but still just used headphones. Surround sound for 1.6 made the game incredibly unfair. Being able to hear specifically in what direction and volume footsteps were coming from was basically a wallhack. I would often use headphones because parents weren't the biggest fans of hours of that a night, and it was so crippling. Funny enough, my semi-pro career (I made $60 total) ended when I abandoned my surround sound when moving out in undergrad.

saiya-jin 4y ago
Friend painted dot in the center of his screen with permanent marker for sniper rifles, especially strongest one became 1-off shotgun. We hated him for that
r9550684 4y ago
sound blaster at some point allowed you to emulate exaggerated "3d sound" polyphony. I distinctly remember a control panel, where you could drag around surround sound speakers and it would attempt to emulate them in headphones.
MuffinFlavored 4y ago
> but still just used headphones I haven't thought of Ventrilo/Teamspeak in years...
- Waterluvian 4y ago
  Ohhhh right that reminded me of another anecdote: sound cancellation wasn't really a working tech back then so my Vent buddies hated hearing my game. I would have a little earbud in connected to Vent on my other computer so I could hear them, but they'd always hear my game, so I ended up developing this half-assed skill of speaking only during quiet times.
  - totoglazer 4y ago
    Ventrillo, a voice chat program popular for gamers. I guess sort of 2002 era Discord.
    - rightbyte 4y ago
      Like Discord but with like 10ms latency to your friends in the area and no fancy pancy filters adding group delay when you speak. Overall a way superior experience to what we have today. I remember having actual effortless conversations on Ventrilo. Nowadays speaking in Discord or MS Teams or what ever is exhausting since you interrupt each other due to the delay. Phones have also gotten worse. It would be interesting to see a number of round trip "ping" for different Voip providers and phone systems ...
  - hackernewds 4y ago
    What is a vent
    - Waterluvian 4y ago
      Vent aka. Ventrilo was a group voice chat application from about 20 years ago. You'd log into a server and have different "chat rooms" to be in, and it was voice-centric (and text to speech and many other features).
      - anthk 4y ago
        Like Mumble?
kentonv 4y ago
Weird. My experience has always been that headphones are more effective at producing precise 3D sound than speakers. And intuitively, it seems like they should, because they can feed each ear with exactly the sound that ear should hear. That said it does require that the game has good 3D sound generation, which isn't trivial, especially differentiating front and back which requires accounting for the shape of the human ear.
- Waterluvian 4y ago
  You generally need special headphones for that and they really didn't work that well 20 years ago. I don't recall there being any way to tell the Half Life engine or my sound card "output 6 channels to the headphones" and the engine wouldn't do A3D if it was a stereo device. By having a 5.1 setup surrounding me (about 2 feet away in each direction, it was.. cluttered), the brain produces a surround sound effect the way it does in normal life. An expert would have to speak further about how headphones can emulate that, but I don't recall it ever really being a thing in the early 2000s.
  - kentonv 4y ago
    I have a vivid memory of playing Doom 2 on a 486 in the 90's, hiding in a building with a cyberdemon circling around the outside, and being able to tell exactly where he was based on sound alone. Needless to say Doom produced no more than 2 channels of audio. Interestingly Doom's audio code was licensed from a third party. When they open sourced it, they had to rewrite that part; I think Carmack said he backported Quake's code. I wonder if that third-party code was just really good or something.
    - deadbunny 4y ago
      I had the same experience with doom 2; heard an Imp fireballing me directly behind me so perfectly I spun around in my chair.
  - rzzzt 4y ago
    The Sierra version of Half-Life had EAX support, IIRC, with strangely long reverberations each time you walked on something made out of metal. claaang
dopeboy 4y ago
Is this true? I used headphones all throughout my CS days. Stereo sound in headphones was enough to give a competitive advantage.
__alexs 4y ago
You only have ~2 ears, there is no need for 5.1 channel surround sound.
- peepee1982 4y ago
  Hearing is more involved than taking sensory input from two sources. If it weren't, there wouldn't be mixing and mastering engineers using speakers. Which they mainly do.
  - voxic11 4y ago
    Pretty sure they use speakers because they are mastering primarily for speaker setups. Not because it increases the accuracy of location information encoded in the sound.
    - peepee1982 4y ago
      Nope. Because headphones don't give you sound pressure fluctuations in your body, and because the depth (not width!) perception is all messed up when using headphones.
  - jacobsenscott 4y ago
    Give this a go, with headphones https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4BltHXngvlk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4BltHXngvlk
    - peepee1982 4y ago
      Yeah, it's a lot better than without the transfer function. It just doesn't react to my head movements, which speakers do (by staying stationary relative to my head)
      - jacobsenscott 4y ago
        Sure, but your screen doesn't move, so your head doesn't move much either.
dbttdft 4y ago
You already get 99% of that "wallhack" by having stereo headphones. The game is mostly flat.
- Waterluvian 4y ago
  For casual level play it’s indeed fine. But the “flatness” of a level doesn’t really mean much. You want to know which specific part of a nearby room someone is in. To the left… in front? Behind? Are they going through the hallway or cellar in cs_italy? Like any game, you get huge value out of slight advantages when you get to the more high level skill.
  - justsomehnguy 4y ago
    >cs_italy FYI there are AMA thread from makers of it on Reddit somewhere. A quite fun read.
  - Hikikomori 4y ago
    You can just move the mouse horizontally slightly and you'll know the direction of the sound instantly. Stereo is not for casual play, it's clearly the opposite as here's not a single professional player that uses surround to my knowledge.
  - least 4y ago
    I was around CAL-M level in 1.6 and I never had a surround sound setup, but I'm unconvinced that it has any meaningful benefit over headphones, which worked perfectly fine for intuiting where someone was. That's hardly a real benefit in higher level play, anyway because you know where everyone could be, anyway, and your movement is dictated by that knowledge as well.
ceedan 4y ago
Surround sound was unnecessary. As long as you had stereo headphones you were fine. I had cheap headphones, expensive headphones and even won headphones at LAN events. Directional audio was never an issue on any headset I'd played with. I tested them all with this video - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IUDTlvagjJA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IUDTlvagjJA The only headphone issue I had in my decades of playing CS were with open ear headphones (Sennheiser HD555) that reduced the punchiness of bass and made footsteps more difficult to hear in CSS which was a terrible game with terrible audio.
Hikikomori 4y ago
How many pro CSGO players use surround?
- dvlsg 4y ago
  Pro players almost definitely all use headphones, because they're typically on stage for tournaments with their teammates right next to them and their opponents somewhere nearby. But even when they're not on stage, they're often in the same room with their teammates. And even if that isn't the case for some reason and a player is in their own room, winning those tournaments is generally the highest honor, so pro players would likely want to practice as close to tournament conditions anyways. Directional audio over headphones is surprisingly good nowadays, though. HRTF is pretty cool stuff.
  - Hikikomori 4y ago
    And because surround is mostly useless, if not messing up sound. With stereo all you need is to move your mouse horizontally to locate the exact direction of any sound.
    - dvlsg 4y ago
      Yeah, for sure. There are other considerations as well - if game sound is coming over loud speakers, you run the risk of it also being picked up by your microphone when you try to communicate with your teammates.
krolden 4y ago
I have no problem sondhacking with my 2.1 setup.
sC3DX 4y ago
audio spatialization has gotten really fancy in games. We can trick your eat into thinking sounds are coming from any direction with a combination of filters, delays, attenuations, etc. Of course it's not as good as the real thing but it is still very convincing (and certainly good enough to be competitive in CS these days).
- MonaroVXR 4y ago
  I figured this out already with speakers and definitely with headphones.

Zurrrrr 4y ago

"He had a special CRT monitor to get the best refresh rate to be as competitive as possible for the game" People like that always trying to compensate for a lack of skill

ackatz 4y ago
Meanwhile all of the best players in the world are using 240hz monitors…
- Zurrrrr 4y ago
  I didn't say refresh rate didn't matter. Buy buying a new CRT in the late 90s with a slightly better refresh rate isn't going to be much of an advantage.
  - nrb 4y ago
    The difference was pretty drastic. My NEC FP2141SB in the early 2000s ran 1280x1024 @ 100hz, those Diamondtron/Tronitron tubes were next-level for their time even though they were super finicky.
    - dbttdft 4y ago
      Yeah the range of CRT quality was huge and visible. Those were a type of product where price actually correlated to quality. With an LCD you could pay $1000 for a "gaming" model and still get something that has basic issues like high input lag or strong overshoot. With CRT it meant the screen is now flat, the image is now bigger than 17", and the focus is now sharper.
- kcb 4y ago
  Most of them purposely gimp themselves by running in 4:3. I've watched major tournament losses due to pro players not being able to spot someone they would if they were running widescreen.
  - 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

glonq 4y ago

I know a couple that got married after meeting in CS1.6 Wild!

gt565k 4y ago

Was scouring ebay back in the day for those samsung CRT monitors that could get 100+hz on 800x640 resolution so I can frag like a pro gamer :D