Valve has pushed the Animgraph 2 animation system to live in Counter-Strike 2, drastically altering animations within the tactical first-person shooter.
The animation overhaul follows a two-week public beta test of Animgraph 2, which attempted to root out bugs and fix them before the system was pushed to the live game.
However, that beta test had no officially supported servers, so most players are only getting a hands-on experience against other players now.
Animgraph 2 full release: What has changed?
What players should now be experiencing is a series of benefits of Valve’s new animation software, which replaces the AnimGraph system initially deployed for CS2.
Benefits include:
- More readable model animations
- Reduced packet size for animation data
- Less CPU load
- Smoother animations on sloped surfaces, and when crouch-jumping
Together, the benefits should lead to a more responsive and intuitive set of animations for players, due to the animations themselves and the reduced load of calculating them.
The more readable animations have seemingly reduced peeker’s advantage, and increased players’ abilities to hold angles more comfortable.
Overall, the changes bring the game more visually in line with CSGO, but also mechanically closer with players seemingly having an easier time holding angles.
Players have also reported a drastic increase in their game’s performance after the update, in some cases gaining approximately 15% frames per second. As CS2 is traditionally CPU-bottlenecked, the reduced workload may provide significant dividends depending on your machine.
The update also brings with it some third-person animations for players to flex their knives and skins. The game now shows bespoke knife pullout animations for specific knives.
Some weapon pullout animations have also been altered, but players will have to wait for their inspect animations to be reflected in third-person.
Burst fire bug in CS2 update quickly patched
While the beta test served to remove several bugs in the model, the Animgraph 2 launch was not flawless, suffering from one short-lived bug that made its way into Premier and Competitive matchmaking.
Weapons with burst fire (Glock/FAMAS) were bugged upon the release of the system, making all three bursted bullets 100% accurate to the same spot simultaneously. The update temporarily made the weapons the most powerful guns in the game before quickly being patched out.
Counter-Strike 2 Animgraph 2 patch notes in full:
Animgraph2
- Minor adjustments to viewmodel animations.
- Adjusted general weapon deploy animation logic.
- Fixed issues with transitioning between knife attacks.
- Fixed Elites not shooting in third-person.
Misc
- Fixed a bug that allowed silently climbing ladders at run speed by sporadically tapping movement keys.
- Adjusted ground smoothing at locations where sloped ground surfaces transition to flat ground.
- Fixed held grenades inheriting incorrect scale in some circumstances such as after being dropped and picked up.
- Fixed a crash at halftime when transitioning from CT to T.
Second update (Burst fire bug fix)
- Fixed a bug that removed the delay between burst fire bullets.
What do you think of the update? Let us know on Insider Gaming’s Discord!
For more CS2 news, see the news of karrigan’s move to Team Falcons.
Darragh is an Esports Journalist for Insider Gaming specialising in Counter-Strike. He loves to explore how esports teams work, or why they very often do not.
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