PROJECT SOURCE REMASTERED
Recreation of Valve's Counter-Strike: Source in Unreal Engine 4. A personal project created for educational purposes only.
A non-commercial game, not for redistribution.

GAMEPLAY FOOTAGE AT THE BOTTOM OF THE PAGE

Developed by Snacks. Development 2017-2022.

WHAT IS COUNTER-STRIKE: SOURCE?


Counter-Strike: Source is a multiplayer first-person shooter game released by Valve and Turtle Rock Studios in November of 2004. The game is centered on its bomb-defusal game mode, putting two teams, Terrorists, and Counter-Terrorists, against each other to complete objectives. Terrorists aim to plant bombs and cause mass destruction while Counter-Terrorists aim to defend and eliminate terrorist players. This game mode became known for its highly strategic and competitive play style. My goal is to re-engineer the game entirely and deliver a 1-1 experience. All of this is done solely for the practice of game development. Here is a Counter-Strike: Source gameplay video from 2021.
WHY REMAKE AN ENTIRE GAME? WHY RECREATE COUNTER-STRIKE: SOURCE?

I love first-person shooter games. I enjoyed titles like Call of Duty, Battlefield, and Counter-Strike the most growing up. As a solo developer, I've always wanted to put my programming skills to the test and take on the challenge of recreating one of these well known AAA games myself. Doing this independently is now possible with advanced game-development and 3D creation software like Unreal Engine and Unity available to the public for free. In late 2017, I started this passion project with the goal of finishing a polished product, understanding the core architecture behind multiplayer first-person shooters, and honoring the popular shooter game Counter-Strike Source.

MY PREVIOUS GAME REMAKE
"Counter-Strike: Remastered," is a previous hobby project that I started for game-development practice. It involved me recrerating a newer title in the Counter-Strike franchise called "Counter-Strike: Global Offensive." This project started development in late 2016, surfaced the internet the summer of 2017, and went viral in the Counter-Strike community, gaining nearly a million views on youtube. Project Source Remastered is the successor to this previous hobby project. With Project Source Remastered, I explicitly intend to recreate an older game in the Counter-Strike franchise called "Counter-Strike: Source," precisely with detail.
RECONSTRUCTION PART 1: GAME ASSETS

Assets such as 3D models, textures, and sounds were extracted from the original game with special software and imported into Unreal Engine. As a programmer, using game-ready assets has allowed me to focus strictly on the logic of the game and its mechanics.

This process is similar to, let's say, if a video editor were trying to recreate his/her favorite movie. The video editor would need all the raw footage of the film to later reconstruct and edit it again as close as possible to the original. Providing the video editor with these raw clips allows he/she to focus on the practice of being a video editor rather than attempting to refilm all of the footage.

Extracting all raw game assets and importing them into Unreal Engine was a tedious process. It took me a couple weeks to get all weapon models and animations extracted from the original game. For the scope of this project, I have only extracted one map. I decided to go with the iconic "Dust 2" map, the successor to "Dust", a map in a previous Counter-Strike title. Original gameplay footage of this map can be found in the Why? section.
I have made graphical improvements to the Dust 2 map with the use of Unreal Engine's photorealistic rendering capabilities. I rebuilt the maps lighting with higher quality lightmaps, global illumination, and ambient occlusion post-processing. I have also upscaled map textures, added new enviornment props, and decals. Some new assets added to this project have been found on the Epic Game's Marketplace and other free sources online.
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Game assets used in Project Source Remastered are the intellectual property of the original creators of Counter-Strike: Source. This project cannot be shared for redistribution.
RECONSTRUCTION PART 2: GAME MECHANICS

Before I even touched the programming side of things, I studied the inner-workings of Counter-Strike: Source by not only watching gameplay videos but by playing the game itself. I own Counter-Strike Source and have played it for countless hours to get a feel for what my remake should play like. I have tried my best to recreate the game's mechanics and user interface just based on my play time.

To make a functional game out of all the imported assets, I used Unreal Engine's Blueprint system to tie things together. Unreal Engine gives you the option to code with C++ or its blueprint visual scripting system to create game logic. I decided to program the game with the Blueprint visual scripting language as it complemented my workflow.

I think Unreal's blueprint system is highly underrated. There has been small controversey of whether using the visual language is "real coding," but in reality programming languages are simply tools that allow us to create and a tool is only as good as its owner. I hope to inspire other developers to start creating more projects with Blueprints. All of the user-interfaces and gameplay mechanics that stem from Counter-Strike: Source below have been re-engineered and programmed from the ground up in Unreal Engine 4 using them.


ENGINE UI DESIGNER SAMPLE
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I emphasized the following features to make sure the remaster plays and feels like the original game. Key features include the Counter Strike movement system, bullet penetration system, gun-play mechanics, recoil mechanics, recoil patterns, object physics, and ragdoll physics.
REMASTERED FOOTAGE
REMASTERED FOOTAGE

To see more gameplay, view the gameplay video at the bottom of the page.
RECONSTRUCTION PART 3: MULTIPLAYER EXPERIENCE

SERVER BROWSER
NEW LOBBY SYSTEM
Dedicated servers are at the core of Project Source Remastered's multiplayer experience. The project connects with Amazon's Gamelift Service, a popular game server hoster even used by Epic Games for Fortnite. The game's dedicated servers are hosted on this service so that players can quickly join matches without third-party subsystems like Steam. The new lobby system features a small arena map where players can ready up and start games together. Players can search and join ongoing matches or player lobbies with the server browser.
FINAL PRODUCT

EARLY GAMEPLAY FOOTAGE
With all the following put together you have a full remake of Counter-Strike: Source. The attempted remake is not perfect, but fundamentally I think my project comes neck to neck to the original title. My number one goal for the project was to have a solid playable game demo that provided the same smooth and satisfying gameplay the original Counter-Strike Source had, and I think I accomplished that.
IN-GAME SCREENSHOT
I'm glad I took on this steep challenge. It has made me a better game developer and problem-solver. This project is the first scalable multiplayer 3D game I have ever fully completed. I have been developing this game for a little over 4 years since I started it in late 2017 and I have learned so much about Unreal Engine and game development since then.

I would love to share a free game demo with the public, but unfortunately assets are the property of Valve and the original creators of the Counter-Strike title. As of now, I will continue to study and practice. I am very excited to see what I can create in the future.