Valve Finally Rolls Out a Fix for the Annoying Water Audio CS:GO Bug
CS:GO maps with water are now playable.
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Valve pushed a huge update for CS:GO earlier today on 16th October, finally rolling out a fix for the long-standing water audio bug. This annoying issue was single-handedly responsible for crippling all CS:GO maps with water present on them, like Inferno, Ancient, Overpass, and more.
The critical audio bug was related to areas with water present on them, leaking the audio of a player walking from over these spots across the entire map. This was a huge disadvantage for players as it gave away crucial information, alerting the opposition of their movements and gameplan.
This bug has affected several professional matches as well and was game breaking due to its potential to alter the outcome of a match in certain clutch situations.
Valve finally fixes the long-standing water audio CS:GO bug
Valve took notice of the problem that the critical water audio bug was causing a few days back, asking the CS:GO community for help so they could better investigate the problem and figure out what was actually causing it.
Well, all the help provided has paid off. Valve figured out that the problem was associated with the spectating player's death locations, they were the source of the audio leak around the map.
This had been first pointed out by CS:GO user 'sv1st' last month, who had shared his breakthrough with the entire community explaining how the water audio bug actually worked, and what exactly was causing it to occur.
According to experiments conducted by the user to solve this mystery, the outcome that he achieved were as follows,
When a player runs through water in CS:GO, the game gives that character an 'on-water' attribute, which basically means that water sounds are applied to that particular player's character.
The same 'on-water' attribute is applied to a dead player when they are spectating their teammate run through water. This is done by the game to allow the spectating player to hear the water sounds as well.
However, all this is from the point of view of the spectating player. But things are a bit bizarre on the server-side. When the spectator receives an 'on-water' attribute, the game automatically assigns the same status to their virtual dead body as well, which is still somewhere on the map. So now, all the players on the server can hear water steps resonating through that particular corpse.
Basically, if a player gets taken down during a game and they start spectating their teammate running through water, the spectating player's virtual dead body on the map will start emitting water sounds same as their teammate's. This is how the footstep sound is audible across the map, giving away key information.
The developers have taken care of this issue now. Professional CS:GO players like Martin "STYKO" Styk, Jonathan "EliGE" Jablonowski, and more had also spoken about this in the past.
Apart from this some other changes that were introduced along with the update included tweaks to CS:GO maps Ancient and Basalt. The whole list of changes can be read by clicking here.
