This is a community submitted article.

What is deathcam? Deathcam is what shows you who fragged you and from where. For roughly four seconds after you die, your view will track this player through walls and show you where he moves.

Some of you reading this will not know what playing CS without deathcam was like, if you haven’t played with fade to black on, or back in the betas. I remember what it was like running around on cs_arabstreets when you had just started playing the game, having no clue how to buy guns, what the enemies look like, where to go, or who just fragged you. It could be seen as frustrating to some, but to me it just added to the atmosphere as I had come from playing Rainbow 6 (and UT99) which similarly prompted one to ask, “where did I just get fragged from?” Certainly, a lack of deathcam made the learning curve of the game a lot steeper.

So after CS went retail, to help the newer players out, Valve introduced deathcam. Valve made deathcam the default, but added in fade to black, which was similar to the old system, as a server side option. This was fine for a while, as it helped the newer players out, allowing Valve to make more money, while the experienced players didn’t really grumble about it as much as other things at the time.

However, soon CS started to be used in professional gaming tournaments like the CPL. Deathcam was deemed inappropriate in a LAN environment; you could be sitting next to your teammate, see where he got shot from, run around and prefire the location his opponent had just run off to. Fortunately for LAN tournaments, Valve had thought ahead and introduced the command ‘mp_fadetoblack 1,’ which solved this problem for LAN play. The drawback to this setting was that it was really boring when used online, as you got to stare at a black screen for two minutes or so after you died, because back in those days a round timer of three was used. Staring at a black screen for half the time you spend playing is not most people’s idea of fun. Fade to black was, and still is, hardly ever used online because of this.

With competitions for lots of money taking place on LAN, teams want to practice online for these events. They desired the ability to talk to each other online while playing, leading to the synchronous rise of third party voice communication software. Programs like Roger Wilco, Teamspeak, and Ventrilo allow players to communicate all the time, not just when alive in CS, which is what the built-in communication software in CS allowed. This created a problem as it changes the game play of CS considerably, giving rise to the phenomenon known as ‘ghosting’. If teams play with Ventrilo online, with deathcam enabled by default a fragged player can call enemy movements long after he is dead, and increase the chance of his team winning the round. Of course this works both ways, but in some situations its effects can really be seen on the round outcome.

For example, on Nuke, the offense is on an eco round and rushes the upper bombsite and luckily manage to get the 3 entry frags - on the rafters, floor, and outside players - and are left in a 2v2 situation. Before the defense’s backup arrives from ramp, the offense decides to take the bomb down the vents, to the lower site. They can’t wait around in upper or they’ll be fragged, so they have to move fast down the vents. However, the defensive player that was fragged in the rafters has a clear view of the site, due to deathcam, and calls “bomb has gone down vents” on Ventrilo. His teammates from ramp room go down to the lower site and frag the planter before he can plant the bomb, and the defense wins the round. If this situation were played out on LAN, with fade to black enabled, the defensive players would take a lot longer to realize that the bomb had been planted in the lower site, and the offense would have a considerably greater chance of winning the round - plus the money bonus for planting. The outcome of this round, and maybe the match, is determined online by deathcam.

Teams practice online for LAN competition, and it is better training if online play is as close to LAN play as possible. As can be seen from the above example, deathcam can drastically change the way that the game is played. A team could play 100 practice games on Nuke online, and they would count for nothing when it comes to LAN. A bit of an over exaggeration, but true to some extent. It is to a team's advantage to practice in the same conditions that they compete.

Fade to black is inappropriate for online practice, because your screen stays black once you die, and - as explained earlier - this is not enjoyable online, but fine on LAN as you can look at teammates’ screens. What I propose is a server side variable, i.e. ‘mp_fadetoblack 2’, wherein a player’s point of view, after being fragged, remains first person as his body falls to the ground, and gradually the screen goes black. This is the same way one’s screen behaves when one dies in Half-Life single player. Once the screen is fully black, and the character fully ‘dead,’ the player’s point of view would then move to any of his surviving teammates. The player would then be able to see exactly what his teammate sees, in the normal way that every CS player is familiar with. All that needs to be eliminated is the floating third person camera which shows your character’s corpse, and who fragged you. This change, if implemented, would not affect public play at all, as deathcam would still be enabled as default. It would only affect CS when played in its competitive form online, with ‘mp_fadetoblack 2’ set on the server.

I would imagine that this feature would be easy to code, as all it requires is the meshing together of two halves of already existing code to form a new variable. This fix would be easy to implement, as all leagues would have to do is add ‘mp_fadetoblack 2’ to their configs. Most serious clans preparing for LAN events would use the change right away for practice games. A fix of such miniscule proportion would not take Valve long to do; it would come in a tiny Steam update that people would not notice unless they were looking for it, but the impact on competition would be huge.

Note: Karpov and Monstro had an art-off for this piece...Monstro won with his superior skills and subsequently ended up having his art used for this article. However, being the good sport he is Monstro agreed that Karpov's art should be acknowledged. You can see it here.