After seeing a post here related to delayed "hitsounds", I have decided to investigate myself into CS2 files, specifically SFX files and the way they are mixed in-game.
So turns out there is indeed a literal delay effect applied to some of the "attacker feedback" group SFX (like kevlar, flesh hit/damage sounds, not for effects like headshot dink though) with value around 150ms, as per previous reddit post and the screenshot of the actual soundevents file below
Furthermore, i noticed that CS2 is using new kevlar hit sounds, which in my opinion lack some punch and "thump", and the legacy CSGO ones despite being directly in the game files and referenced in the soundevents file are not being used at all.
So I decided to make a mod which gets rid of the delays in SFX mentioned above. In addition it also replaces the default kevlar hit sounds with a custom ones where I took the CS2 and CSGO sounds for the kevlar hit and combined/processed those together in an external audio editing software. Here's a comparison between default SFX with delays and my mod with changes mentioned above.
https://reddit.com/link/1k9np5g/video/u32ycsvdbixe1/player
In my humble opinion, instead of implementing 128 tick or getting rid of the poor subtick, which gets blamed for every issue people are encountering in this game, I think there is still alot of room for improvement in terms of "visual (and sonic) feedback", which you don't notice on a daily basis while playing CS2, but when booting CSGO and comparing certain aspects of it to CS2 you get the overall "this feels so much better/satisfying" impression. Looking into things like refining more SFX or the overall sound mixdown, making certain particle assets more "punchier" (like blood impacts) or making the ragdolls "snappier" could vastly improve the gameplay even more.
TL;DR – Yes, there is a coded delay on certain SFX "hit sounds" and removing it makes visual (and auditory) feedback much more satisfying, comparable to CSGO.
Credits to Source 2 Viewer for being able to browse and extract CS2 files. You can check it out here – https://valveresourceformat.github.io/
10 Comments
Hopefully they can get rid of this delay, intended or not
Bad timing to post it. Hopefully this will not end in oblivion. Best timing imo is evening EU
At this point, I’m just impressed that Valve intentionally makes the game worse.
Great work! This does look smoother! The hardcoded delay is likely to sync animation/splatters n stuff may be, or it kinda breaks down when players have different/high ping ? IDK just speculating.
Why would they add a delay to such a crucial feedback parameter? This is mindboggling!?!?
The difference for game feel and responsiveness is night and day in your video. Thanks for checking this out.
Not gonna lie, I’m happy for this post, but it got me wondering how this was even overlooked in the first place. Did the people who designed CS2 even played CSGO and think, “Yeah, I should probably keep this”?
It reminds me of like copying an answer from a student without realising he put the wrong answer on the wrong question. Like, this should be at minimum should have been sorted by early beta testing by flom and the rest no?
Do you think this mod is vac bannable
yeah that after mod looks so much smoother, im not really sure why they wouldn’t just have it instant
They can’t fix the delay so they just delay everything
They must change it, that feels so much better
Why on earth would you think delaying a sound of a hit would do any good. But also, for two years everyone is talking about how bad the spray is in cs2, even saying that the game doesn’t inform you well enough, that the error probably is in the process of exchanging information. In this case, why didn’t they check for the delays literally build in the script of the game. Did they forget they had a delay programmed there?