Player models now raise their rifles higher in third person, and the files set up frost that grows outdoors and melts indoors.
Valve’s release notes for the Counter-Strike 2 update on run to five lines. The files changed in the same update tell a bigger story: 151 third-person animation clips were rebuilt, and ten new settings describe a frost effect for players, weapons and chickens. Neither is in the notes, which we covered in our article on the hotfix.
Rifles come up to the shoulder
A Reddit post on r/GlobalOffensive put two screenshots of the same T model side by side. On 23 October the model holds the AK-47 low, at chest height, with the upper body upright. After Thursday’s update the stock sits high in the shoulder, the rifle is close to eye level and the head is tucked down towards the sights.
Third-person models are how players see each other in a match. Every changed file is a world-model animation, so your own first-person view model is untouched.
The files back up the timing. The update replaced 105 world-model clips in the folder for rifles, SMGs, shotguns and machine guns, plus 46 pistol clips, all of them draw and reload animations. It also rebuilt the world-model animation graph, the file that drives third-person animation, and gave its aim node a new blend time of 0.3 seconds. None of the updates between 23 October and Thursday touched those files, according to the changes tracked by SteamDB.
The only animation line in Valve’s notes says the update “fixed some cases of popping and glitching when switching weapons and reloading at extreme angles”. A new stance is not mentioned, and Valve has not said why the models changed.
Frost that grows outdoors and melts indoors
The second find is in the same build. Dataminer aquaismissing posted the new console variables minutes after the update went live.
The frost files were first reported by Dust2.us. This is what the update adds:
- A map switch: a new “frostenabled” option for maps, off by default. The description in Valve’s map editor reads: “Players, weapons and chickens frost over outdoors (traces to the sky), and melt indoors.”
- Timings: frost grows to full in 10 seconds outdoors, melts in 10 seconds indoors and dries 20 seconds after that. The cold fades out within 128 units of cover.
- Heat: every shot warms the barrel by 0.05, where 1 clears the whole barrel, so roughly 20 shots melt it off. A hot barrel takes 20 seconds to cool. A lit molotov’s rag starts to heat after one second and is fully warm after 10.
- Graphics: a new frost texture, frost values in the weapon shader and a new “Parallax Occlusion Mapping” video setting, described as giving “some surfaces, such as snow, real looking depth”.
All ten frost console variables are marked as development only. Isla (@BeepIsla) posted a clip with the effect switched on: an AWP covered in white frost outside, which fades as the player walks into a building.
aquaismissing linked the frost to earlier leaked strings that, in the dataminer’s words, show “Cobblestone is going to be a snowy map”. Valve has not announced Cobblestone, a winter event or any map that uses the frost. Valve’s own tweet about the notes did drop a hint of sorts: it swapped the “o” in “Notes” for a freezing-face emoji.
