Counter-Strike 2 update improves surfing & introduces ‘TrueView’ demo feature

Darragh Harbinson, Senior Editor

Last Updated: 05/11/2025

The latest Counter-Strike 2 update has brought improvements to surf maps and a new demo feature called ‘TrueView.’

The new feature added by Valve promises to make game playback demos more reflective of players’ in-game experiences.

What is TrueView in Counter-Strike 2?

Trueview is a feature intended to put Counter-Strike’s demos more in line with a player’s point of view, as opposed to the server-side information that demos traditionally pull from.

Valve describes the feature as follows:

“TrueView, demo playback will match the player’s original experience much more closely.

“Previously, demo playback showed the server’s view of the world, without accounting for network latency. This could be confusing because shots would hit that didn’t look like they should have, and vice versa.

“TrueView provides a more accurate representation of the observed player’s experience by re-running their client-side prediction.”

The update should allow players to review their own and opponents’ actions more accurately, allowing for better reflections on their engagements, crosshair placements, opponents’ tendencies and so on.

However, Valve noted that the feature is not perfect, stating, “Even with TrueView active, there may still be some differences between what you see in the demo and what the player originally saw (especially with slow-motion playback). For example, damage effects will have different timing during demo playback due to the way CPU and GPU work are pipelined.”

Surf fixes hope to revive community mode

Surfing in Counter-Strike is an emergent property of the game’s physics system, where players can slide on slanted surfaces.

The interaction was not originally intended, but became popular amongst community-created workshop maps which exploited the mechanic by designing courses which could only be completed by skillfully building and maintaining momentum.

Counter-Strike’s movement community was a well-established aspect of CSGO, but CS2’s introduction broke many of the underlying systems that made movement (kz) and surfing courses possible.

In the latest month, Counter-Strike has seen adjustments to bunnyhopping and now surfing, which may show that Valve’s developers now have space to help niche community aspects of Counter-Strike which have been neglected to polish CS2’s core gameplay.

The November 4 update sees changes to surf that should prevent the most frustrating aspect of surfing in CS2, namely, stopping suddenly with seemingly no obstacle in sight.

Despite the improvements, surf in CS2 is still somewhat hamstrung by limitations surrounding subtick and the speed at which players can travel.

November 4 Counter-Strike 2 update in full:

• Fixed a case where air acceleration was clamped incorrectly while surfing.
• Fixed a case where slowly surfing up a ramp was handled incorrectly due to misidentification as a jump apex.
• Fix a bug causing “Delay Sniper Rifle Un-Scope after Shot” to be inconsistent.

• Added TrueView demo playback, which reconstructs the observed player’s original experience more accurately by re-running client-side prediction.
• TrueView playback will show the effects of Damage Prediction, if it was enabled by the observed player at the time.
• TrueView does not reconstruct the precise timings of rendered frames, so some differences between the original player’s experience and TrueView playback will remain, especially in very slow motion playback.  The player’s frame at the time when the mouse was clicked, which is used for hit registration, is shown accurately to the nearest demo playback frame. However, reaction effects such as recoil, muzzle flash, blood splatter, and ragdoll are delayed while playing the game by one or two frames due to the way CPU and GPU work is pipelined, and will not appear at the same time during demo playback.
• TrueView demo playback might not work properly on old demos and is disabled by default if the playback client version does not match the client version when the demo was recorded. You can set cl_demo_predict 2 to override this.
• Fixed a bug causing third person models to not animate smoothly.
• Fixed a bug causing time to lurch forward by one tick when unpausing a demo.

• Animation fixes for G3SG1 bolt.
• Fixed developer console scrollbar to accept mouse clicks.

Darragh Harbinson, Senior Editor

Darragh Harbinson is an esports writer specialising in Counter-Strike. He has written for Esports News UK, Esports Insider, UKCSGO, Dexerto, and Rush B Media.

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