Hot off the heels of Build 272, we are happy to bring you our first update of 2015. We closed out 2014 with a bang, two months of sales bringing all sorts of new and old players back to NS2 and we have been retaining a good number of them. Thank you! While these last few patches have been smaller they have also introduced some great new stability and efficiency to NS2. We continue to work on this and refine the changes we made in hopes of making NS2 run better than ever and to make room for future changes and updates. What’s on the horizon? Well the Community Development Team is hard at work migrating some of the backend programming from Visual Studio 2005 to 2013. With this change we can finally move towards a new build system and a better way for the CDT to work on future patches and features for NS2! You will probably see a couple more smaller patches over the coming months, but in the background the CDT is working on something BIGGER. We have been thinking a lot over the last few months of some cosmetic and foundational changes that could really be good for existing players but also potentially spark more longevity from new players during sales. The CDT will bring you more information about these changes as we get closer to release, but as always you can check out our Community Trello Board to follow development and even vote on items that you think would be great additions or fixes to the game. All of us at the CDT thank you for your continued support of NS2 and our efforts, here’s to a new year and new possibilities! IMPROVEMENTS Added ability to click on a player's row in the scoreboard to check their Steam/Hive profiles Added option to mute Text chat Added icon to the scoreboard indicating if someone is your friend on Steam Made it so the scoreboard shortens the player name if it overlaps Muting a player's voice/text chat will last 6 hours so it's persistent across map changes Rookies will always show the "(rookie)" tag in chat even if they're not in your own team Spectators are now sorted above ReadyRoom players Dropping structures as a Marine Commander will display the location name and status of the Power Node for the structure Missing files will now show up in the log instead of being silently ignored Added a new variant of Alien Vision based on Huzes' AV - Thanks Huze! Added no_ip material which disallows placement of Infantry Portals on this surface Added a separate bind for movement override for commander Added consistency checking for hmp files FIXES Stop sounds from playing on destroyed entities Stop Insert from running destructors on uninitialized memory Linux should now support non-ascii Fixed being able to tell who’s the enemy Commander by their chat color Fixed that commanders bots did not work or got kicked by the AFK kick Fixed that the Alien Buy-Menu messed up with some translations (e.g. Russian) Fixed embryos not having a taunt in the ready room Fixed Babblers being invisible when cloaked by a shade Fixed menu being unresponsive if mousing over webview while a window was loading Fixed sending blank chat messages causing messages to overlap Fixed being able to place an IP in eclipse where you shouldn't be able to STEAM PROTOTYPE - Added Utils\WorkshopBackup, a simple server to allow servers ops to add backup download for mods. See ns2\utils\workshopbackup\readme.txt for details. Added support for servers to point clients to a list of backup servers and clients to download from backup instead of Steam Backup servers also solves the problem of the server running an old version of a mod Fixed bug that required all http request to finish inside 15 seconds Made clients more stubborn when it comes to requesting downloading mods (10 retries) Improved progress reporting PERFORMANCE Relevance calculation offloaded from main server thread, freeing up about 5-15% main thread CPU. It is now recommended to run the server on at least 2 cores. Servers running close to the edge will now show up as Loaded in the performance browser BALANCE Decreased max GL player damage to 132 from 165. Increased FT player damage from 15 to 16, and increased structure damage from 15 to 18 Reduced Flamethrower cost to 15 pres KNOWN ISSUES The progress indication on mod download is broken - it stays zero until download complete. Late build blocker forced a revert, should be fixed in 274 MAPS Removed holiday themed ready rooms Kodiak Fixed stuck spot in hangar bay vent for fades Eclipse Fixed FPS problem in access alpha Docking Removed random pipe prop in locker room