We're almost there. CS:GO has taken a giant leap forward with this latest update, and wow, have they pushed out a lot with this update. We've even run out of ways of saying how CS:GO is updated yet again, a testament to the developers' commitment to the game.

This most recent update has hopefully tweaked the game enough for people to really enjoy being able to watch it on streams, and tuned the gameplay enough for it to be a worthwhile change.

Not only has the game's audio been tweaked so the fadeout is much more equivalent to the previous editions of the Counter-Strike franchise, they have also fixed any recent bugs mentioned, such as the amazingly spammable A bombsite on Inferno, and the awp scope reload bug that I'm sure some of you have had the frustration of encountering. Further to that, the "aimpunch" (best word I've ever had the privilege to type) that comes with a headshot has been changed to make it much more bearable, and similar to the previous CS games.

Perhaps most encouragingly though, is the news that the developers have taken on board that streaming the game is perhaps not the easiest, and have taken steps to introduce the game on an easier level to the masses when watching. They have added X-ray mode, which shows up like L4D2, and an equivalent GUI for casting and spectating, that provides teams with a full scoreboard that shows the players' health, active weapon, and armour status.

The GUI looks like this:

A high resolution image is available here.

The full changelog is as follows:

Release Notes for CS:GO update 2012-08-30

[ Gameplay ]
- Adjusted footstep volume fade out and maximum audible distance to match source/1.6.
- Increased default Casual match length to 15 rounds.
- Fixed an issue that caused the AWP to zoom to the wrong level after reloading.
- Tuned flinch aimpunch values.
- Fixed a bug in the penetration code that incorrectly determined the exit spot as being not solid when it was which allowed penetrating much further than it should have.

[ UI ]
- Added x-ray vision of own teammates for dead players.
- Added new spectator UI that shows both team’s active weapon, player name, health, armor, etc, when spectating a 10 player match.
- Added a new convar "sv_competitive_official_5v5" that:
o Forces a match to display 5v5 scoreboards regardless of maxplayers setting ( Allows setting maxplayers to 12 to allow spectators into a 5v5 match ).
o Allows connected spectators to see both teams in x-ray.
- Added support for international characters in play with friends lobby chat.
- Fixed an issue that caused the mouse cursor to reset its mouse position when clicking on the UI when the window didn't have focus.
- Fixed being able to open the radio menu when you were an observer.
- You can't toggle the scoreboard in half-time now
- Fixed the scoreboard win animation firing before the scoreboard was told to come up in the end match state and was usually missed
- The countdown timer now flashes prior to the start of a match.

[ General ]
- Reduced frequency of polling server console to save CPU.
- Fixed a rare crash when applying decals.
- Significantly improved precision of dedicated server frames to match tickrate.
- Clamped dedicated server fps to match quantized tickrate.
- Fixed two exploits. One that would allow players to see out of smoke with much more clarity than players could see them if they were boosted up while inside the smoke volume. Also made the smoke a tad shorter/smaller. Two, fixed players being able to see through a few trains out of the corner of their screens on de_train and de_train_se. Thanks Volcano.
- Fixed messages in scoreboard overlapping at end match.
- To pass a vote in competitive mode, all eligible voters minus one must now vote yes

[ Community Servers ]
- Fixed cases when values of some convars set on community servers would not correctly replicate to clients.
- Game modes configuration file now specifies cfg files to exec instead of keyvalue pairs of convars to make it easier for server operators to configure their game modes. To tweak game modes it would be sufficient to provide gamemode_competitive_server.cfg and _server.cfg files for other game modes which will exec after stock cfg files.
- Linux: running srcds_run with -autoupdate will now update the server during hibernation, in addition to changelevel.
- Fixed an issue that was limiting connectivity to community servers to only 25 players.
- Deprecated mp_ggtr_rounds_per_half. Use mp_maxrounds instead.
- Changed timelimit matches to stop at round end instead of exactly when the limit expires.