LambdaGeneration Community Join our new Community Platform — Share Half-Life news and community content. Built by fans, for fans.
We Are The Lambda Generation. LambdaGeneration is a website dedicated to the video game Half-Life. ( We're basically really passionate about crowbars, headcrabs and anyone who has goatee with a PhD in theoretical physics… )

CS: Global Offensive SDK To Enter Beta In One Week, Will Feature Steam Workshop Integration [UPDATED]

News & Rumors Other

[UPDATE: Chet Faliszek tells us that CS:GO’s SDK will contain the classic Hammer Editor.]

What would Counter-Strike be without custom maps? Well… pretty much nothing. As a matter of fact, most, if not almost all of the maps held most dear by Counter-Strike fans were created by third-party mappers. So the release of a level design toolkit is crucial to CS:GO’s development. Hammer (or, to call it by its maiden name, WorldCraft) is getting a bit old, and Portal has already replaced it with a far simpler and more versatile Puzzle Creator. So what’s going on over at the CS front?

CS: Global Offensive SDK To Enter Beta In One Week, Will Feature Steam Workshop Integration [UPDATED]

Finally, the Seven Day Cool Down guys have posted up their audio interview with Gabe. An in-depth podcast, featuring some very interesting things we’ll also be covering shortly. Beyond the interview itself, they also posted up this screencap of a brief e-mail exchange with Gabe, featuring the aforementioned SDK revelation:

Steam Workshop integration is a brilliant idea – perhaps custom maps will be just as important to CS now as they used to be back in the old days. Downloading, rating, and uploading maps will be much easier with the Workshop (making custom maps from the communty into full-fledged official game maps will also be far easier this way), but I do wonder if the SDK’s level editor toolkit will still be the same old Hammer Editor which, as I previously mentioned, is getting a bit old. Perhaps, just like their Portal 2 Puzzle Creator, Valve is planning to offer us a brand new level editor. I wouldn’t bet much on it, but it is a possibility.

Might we also also see it on the consoles? It remains unknown if the Portal 2 Puzzle Creator will make its way to the PS3 and Xbox, even if its simplified controls and design would make it a perfect fit for the console experience, although Steam Workshop integration would have to be added, which could possibly exclude the Xbox entirely. Similarly, perhaps a console CS:GO level editor would also be a success – as fans of the honorable TimeSplitters series will undoubtedly tell you.

I also wonder if the SDK will offer more in the way of moddability and customization. What would CS modding be without the countless weapon and character skins? Perhaps CS:GO’s Steam Workshop component will also feature support for uploading, rating, and downloading custom skins. It’s so wide-spread that it couldn’t possibly do Valve any harm to make it official.

In other CS:GO-related news, this week’s beta update brought a number of bugfixes, balance changes and other such things to the game. Nothing really substantial per se (which is good – too much content all at once can make for a diluted testing experience), although earlier this week they posted up an in-depth heat map showing statistics for approximately 6.5 million bullets fired on DE_Train, as well as a lengthy recap and analysis of the 2012 Copenhagen Games’s CS tournaments.

3 Comments

  1. Well I higly doubt we will see a wole new map editor, maybe yes for Portal 2 since test chambers are less complex than any other levels in Valve games, tho for CSGO there will be surelly some improvements to hammer, maybe some new source tools who knows..
    I would like to see more example content, mostly about some new tech like flexes drived by joints, twist joints, procedural jigglebones, etc.

    And if Valve is planning on use the Workshop to host community created content I really hope they give users more space, right now there is a limit of 200mb per mod and 1gb of total space. Map makers will be the more affected surelly, mostly if they also upload content for multiple games and not just CSGO.

  2. >>So what’s going on over at the CS front?
    Still old, but pretty good Hammer.

  3. Wow! Sounds amazing!

Leave a reply


Sign in via Steam to skip spam and contact fields.