The update that many people have been expecting, and worrying about, has arrived today. Valve has released an update to its Half-Life 1 Engine today and it will affect all multiplayer games based on the HL1 engine including Counter-Strike 1.6 and Day of Defeat. However, the big worry among the community was that demo viewing would not work with the updated protocol.

Despite reports to the contrary, initial testing conducted by GotFrag staff has shown that demos are currently still able to be viewed using the playdemo command but using the viewdemo option gives the following error: "WARNING! filename.dem has an outdated demo format". Also, according to several players, the update has added an additional noise when you try to silent run. Duck jumping still works.

Stay tuned to GotFrag.com and this news post as we continue further testing to see exactly what else this update has added/changed. Below is the official changelog that has been released.

Update: 100 is the maximum value for cl_updaterate and will be changed to 20 if you attempt a higher number. Also, ex_interp may only contain a value between 0.05 and 0.1.

Half-life 1 Engine Update Released

A new set of Steamworks features have been released for all Half-Life 1 engine multiplayer games: Counter-Strike 1.6, Condition Zero, Team Fortress Classic, Deathmatch Classic, Ricochet, Day of Defeat and Half-life 1 Deathmatch. The update includes Steamworks features such as player avatars in the scoreboard when playing Counter-Strike and Condition Zero. The update also contains several bug fixes, listed below. Note that this update will require all game servers to restart.

Bug Fixes

- Removed the need to manually re-login and re-authenticate to Steam while in game
- Fixed a crash on startup when running windowed with a non-standard desktop resolution
- Removed the display of saytext (in-game chat text) from players whom you've blocked in Steam friends
- Locked down several engine cvars to prevent malicious script exploits
- Enforced file consistency on several sprites in Counter-Strike
- Removed "ex_extrapmax" cvar (no longer needed)

Server

- Added "-noaff" command-line option to disable setting of thread affinity
- Added "bannedcfg" cvar so admins can choose which file is written to by the "writeid" command