Natural Selection 2 Build 269 is now live on Steam! Work never stops on NS2, all of us on the Community Development Team (CDT) have been hard at work to fix, load time, crash, and other issues that players have been reporting. We hope that Build 269 will help those players experience the improvements from Builds 267 and 268 like the rest of the community and see why there is no better time to be playing NS2 than now! Since this is a maintenance patch you will notice our changelog is not as massive as the last couple, but have no fear it is all quality over quantity. Moving forward the CDT has laid out plans for the upcoming holiday season and beyond. Our team has some fantastic ideas and other exciting features planned and we are still looking for players interested in joining our playtest group. If you are interested in participating in the playtest group, sign up here! A final note to all of the community, THANK YOU! All of you have been so supportive and helped us figure out some of the issues that have come from the recent patches and we cannot begin to tell you how much your feedback is appreciated. Please remember, with every new patch you should always disable your mods and be aware that servers running mods may not have been updated for the new patch yet. -Your Community Dev Team FIXES Fixed issues of the texture manager which caused the client to crash while loading textures which use rgba compression or include mipmaps Fixed that using non precached cinematics crash the client Fixed Quick Join Fixed long load times with some HDDs caused by overloading the io queue with too many worker threads Fixed Alien Lifeform Counters in the Alien Buy Menu Fixed that Jetpacks did not show up correctly at the scoreboard Fixed triggers and models having incorrect settings in the editor_setup causing things like e.g. ladders not to work at maps Fixed that client mods which fail the consistency check were not disabled. Fixed some other issues with cinematics (causing things like client crashes when someone used umbra) Fixed that echoed structures were not attacked by arcs. Added draw calls back to r_stats Fade Blink sound volume was corrected Fixed Overview.exe crash Fixed some issues with the linux client Improvements “ForceEvenTeams” vote now uses the skill ratings from hive to balance teams. It avoids moving players that have already chosen a team and first tries to balance the teams using the players in the readyroom. If it must swap players that have already chosen a team, it uses the minimum number of them so most people will stay on the same team. New commands for controlling loading behavior: res_workers n (n = number of used loading worker threads, default 1 ) res_prelock on/off res_preload on/off res_verbose 1-3 ( turns on verbose logging at loading ) Commander Hints are now fully translatable Polish translation is now 100% done (thanks to Carnage and Acedude) SDK Fixed Editor volumes missing the size parameter.