Build 203 is now live on Steam. Our focus for the past week has been getting the build in shape for PAX East. Please let us know about any significant bugs you find in this build. We have a day or two to do some last minute fixes before Friday when we show off NS2 to a whole new audience!

Balance

• Onos Gore back to 70 Puncture damage (miscommunication).
• Reduced Onos hide armor from 6 to 5. This lowers his effectiveness against early game, pre-upgrade/Rifle Marines, while affecting him less late-game. There are other balance/map-control issues that are still to be addressed, but this should improve the game in the short-term.
• Slowed Gorge healspray rate of fire by about ~25% and increased energy cost slightly.

Features

• Added a button to go back to the Ready Room (F4 by default)
• Added Skulk view blood effect when hitting a Marine.
• New Victory/Defeat screen artwork.
• Added land sound effects.
• Added a precaching mechanism for surface shader to avoid multi-second pauses during gameplay caused by compiling the shader for the first time.

Fix

• Reduced texture stretching on the infestation.
• Fixed bug where surface shaders were not always properly cached.
• Fixed crash bug when called Model:AddMaterial with a nil value.
• Fixed a bug where a dead player could enter a Hive and crash the server.
• Normal armories will show weapons in red which require an advanced armory to purchase.
• Fixed bug were jumps from wall would sometimes have no effect, even when you were close enough to a wall.
• Added protection against script passing a bad value to Model:GetAttachPointCoords.
• Fixed an exploit where you could gain crazy speeds as a Skulk with just 1 jump in crevice.
• Fixed animation glitches after building a Structure.
• Fixed bug where sometimes a Harvester wouldn't be connected to the initial Hive through Cysts.
• Fixed 1s delay between when a Commander places a structure and when it shows up.
• Fixed bug where Structures would incorrectly display the wrong animation for one frame when they were dropped by the Commander.
• Fixed a bug where the Skulk run animation is shown when jumping off walls.
• Fixed bug where you would "slide" as Skulk when landing on a surface.
• Fixed r_mode normals and depth not displaying properly when anti-aliasing is enabled.
• The Skulk leap animation will now play when the Skulk jumps and then leaps.

SDK

• Increased console history size from 5 to 50.