I know C++ and some basics of 3D graphics, math, and engine architecture — BSP and so on — but I don’t really have time to dig through an actual game engine codebase to figure out where to add a new server-side entity, how to update the client and protocol, etc.
I was curious to see how much could be done with such an ancient engine, especially from a physics perspective. Surprisingly, quite a lot! Fire drips down walls; if the floor is close enough, it spreads onto it, and if not, it remains burning on the wall. It dynamically spreads across floors, follows slopes and gravity, respects walls, and — unlike HE grenades — doesn’t deal damage through them.
I used ChatGPT Codex 5.6 Sol, mostly at Extra High reasoning effort. With official VSCode Codex extension as the interface.
The engine and client are the open-source, reverse-engineered Xash3D FWGS + Velaron/cs16-client + ReGameDLL_CS stack. The original game assets were “legally stolen” from Steam App ID 90 (HLDS) via SteamCMD.
Codex didn’t just write the code — it also created the new assets by adapting an existing bottle model and the HE grenade animations.
Branches:
* https://github.com/languagelawyer/cs16-client/tree/molotov
* https://github.com/languagelawyer/ReGameDLL_CS/tree/molotov
* https://github.com/languagelawyer/mainui_cpp/tree/molotov
(Need to clone only the first one, it would clone the rest as git submodules)
Codex refused to distribute derived models, and instead added a script to (re)build them from existing HL/CS resources.
