Dust2-Trim-Theory

• Dust2 trim is not just ornamental, it is constructive for the eye and a driving factor for organization. To make a map as good as dust2, you make it while accounting for the trim, you do not add trim when done.
• Temp

Dust had a trim that was 32 units high exactly, and 32 units was a very special amount of units in a game like Counter-Strike (original) versus the new Counter-Strike 2.

If fully crouched, 32 units completely obscured your view. Back in the days of Counter-Strike: Source, Valve increased the player height to match that of the HL2 player model. [citation]. This forever changed the perspective of Counter-Strike, and created a snowballing of problems. Valve ultimately lowered the height a player crouches to solve the parallax viewing angle issue.

This was a major turning point in the game, it now truly felt different than the original even if you weren't moving and only crouching.

It's important to see the link between the gameplay changes and the trim theory. If making a texture, because the default scale of the texture was 1, you simply made a texture 32 units high, and it would fit perfectly in a 32 unit ledge. It is also noteworthy that lightmaps scale with texture resolution, and as we ventured into the .25 texture scaling of the Source Engine, the game has a snowball effect of visual changes from one innocuous change to do with player eye height.

So now when looking at a ledge in the beginning and the end of Counter-Strike's life, you can see one is beautiful and perceivable as a continuum it has so many embedded nuances, whereas the modern version of Counter-Strike 2 the ledge has no expected standard height, no expected player interaction, and is almost always a model now which distracts from the smooth simplicity and functional role of the original 32 unit ledge.

Because Counter-Strike was hugely influenced by Dust, using a Dust trim style was often synonymous with Counter-Strike itself. Naturally the visual style becomes disjointed as the usage of a trim base is slowly forgotten, caught up in Deception Based Obsolescence because mappers are not Inviting-God into their day and instead mapping for a dead entity corporation.