CS:GO Dev John McDonald Talks About New UI and Many Other Features

John McDonald, a programmer at Valve, recently took some time to answer various question on state of Counter-Strike: Global Offensive on Twitter. Among other things, he talked about new Panaroma UI, 128 tick servers, matchmaking problems. The main points are gathered below.

General Information:

• There are currently about 35 people working on CS:GO;
• There is no plans to unban ex-iBUYPOWER members that were involved in a matchfixing scandal;
• Valve are considering making 128 tick servers, but are aware that they may put in disadvantage players with lower end PCs. A possible solution is to segment players, which may result in longer queue times;
• Problems with matchmaking usually occur at off peak times, where there are not enough players to compose a balanced match. Also the system takes into account not player’s rank, but his or her trust factor;
• Long alt-tabbing cannot be fixed, as it is connected with DirectX9 technology – game has to reload everything from scratch when you tab out. As a work-around the developer suggested to play in windowed fullscreen mode, and noted that it should not increase latency.

New Panorama UI:

• New UI is still a focus for the dev team, as it was in 2017. No ETA;
• It will replace almost all of the UI elements, including main menu, lobbies, inventory, in-game, etc. At the same time, server browser and demo ui haven’t been touched yet;
• It will fix the issue the lag when pressing ESC in game;
• New UI won’t decrease in-game FPS, instead it may even increase it;
• Custom HUDs won’t be supported because they may give an advantage to a player.

Demos:

• It was mentioned that Valve want to fix demo rewind, but are very cautious because it may break the old demos;
• New UI and Source 2 won’t fix the problem;
• The general idea of the potential fix is to have more key frames to which the game will be able to scrub backwards, and it will be enabled by a special user command.

Cheats:

• They prefer server-side anti-cheat solutions (like VACnet) to more invasive methods;
• VAC-banned players won’t be able to participate in Valve events since it “would degrade the whole scene”.