What is the goal of the pro mod?

Primarily, the goal is to create a version of counter-strike that is designed specifically for competitive play and broadcasting. There are many more details regarding our goals for the project on our website, which can be found at www.cspromod.com).

What kind of experience does your staff have?

Alex Garfield, our Executive Director, brings a staggering amount of experience with him both in Counter-Strike and management. None other than the manager of Team EG, Alex knows how things work around large events and has the ability to not only guide us in the right direction, but also get the networking together that's required for the project's success. Alex will oversee the CSP counsel, which will be discussed later in the interview.

Al "Drax" Mendoza, our second Executive Director, previously on teams such as zEx and x6, has knowledge of past and present Counter-Strike that most people aren't even aware of. Drax brings a great sense of how CSP should feel, while also playing a vital role in coding the project to ensure it meets his absolute specifications.

Besides our managers, we have a wide array of talented people working on CSP such as Buckland "Kilo" Darrell and Josh "n00b" Team, who have been working hard under wraps with the website to bring the community a great way to communicate with the Development team directly, and not to mention an all around great looking site.

Doing by far the hardest and most important work on CSP are our coders. In addition to Drax, Mack "mizzack" Corl, David "Dracu|A" Sanghera, and our Head Coder Pete "SIGKILL" Michaleas, work hard each day to piece CSP together from the ground up. They all bring a very high level of coding knowledge with them and a great deal of Counter-Strike experience to ensure what they make is, in fact, the way it should be.

Last but not least we the Mapping/Art department, which consists of Mike "aTam" Mayea working with the help of Nick "blinja" du Plessis. Mike brings past mod-making experience as well as years of mapping and texture design experience. He is responsible for all of our maps, and will be re-texturing each map from the ground up later in the project (the current map versions, while they're very good-looking, make use of textures provided in the SDK).

Some things in CS :S work a bit better than CS 1.6 like the jumping or how accurate the DE is? How do you choose what to keep from which game?

There are quite a few things in CS:S that are nice compared to CS 1.6. The general rule of thumb we're going to use for this type of thing is: if it is "nicer" in CS:S and doesn't interfere with the competitive nature of the game, we'll most likely include it, unless there is a negative response from the community. Any changes we make to the game will in the end come down to our CSP counsel, which will be comprised of a number of very high profile individuals, and which will serve to represent the interests of the professional competitive community.

What about wall spam? Right now it is very limited in Source but in some peoples mind overblown in 1.6. Where do you see the balance?

Wall spamming will indeed be included in CSP, and will be implemented as a mapping parameter. This will allow us to choose which walls are spammable, and how much damage reduction a wall will have. In the end, we will most likely end up with something very similar to the spam of 1.6, minus any spams that are deemed completely unreasonable.

Do you plan on making custom maps as well as making the Source ones video card friendly?

When it comes to mapping, our main focus is bringing the core of what made the original map so great into its CSP counterpart. Mike, for example, made de_nuke unit for unit the same as its 1.6 version, while maintaining all the spam spots in the previous edition, and the original sound quirks. Because such elements as excessive obstacles (such as barrels), looping soundscapes, and insanely computer-taxing 3D skyboxes, are unnecessary for competitive play, we have kept them out of CSP map versions. We've stuck to a clean, simple approach, and struck a balance between making sure the mod looks great, while also considering users with lower spec computers. We have thought about custom maps, and Mike is certainly qualified to lead us down that path, but as of right now all of our mapping focus is centered on reproducing the original maps. Some time down the road when more of the mod is completed, new maps will most likely become one of our focuses.