Gorilla. Has. Arrived.

NS2 Gorilla Gameplay Trailer

Features

• You can now evolve to Onos when your team has three hives.
• The Onos can toss marines with his Gore attack, smash structures and Stomp on the ground, sending a shockwave that disables marine structures for 5 seconds. Upgrades are no longer available, sentries stop firing, Infantry Portals stop spawning, etc.
• Added Prototype Lab and the ability to research and buy Jetpacks
• Added new map: ns2_mineshaft
• Added camera animation and display during count down phase.
• Name tags now appear over the head of nearby teammates.
• Added lines for rally points.
• Mines detonate when hit by Stomp.
• Added an option to enable mouse acceleration (off by default)
• Infestation is now displayed on minimap (dying infestation is indicated red)
• Added some missing Marine structure icons.

Balance

• Reduced Rifle butt range from 1.5 meters to 1 meter (now same as Skulk bite)
• Shotgun damage changed to Light (armor is twice as effective against it). Made it lighter to carry and increased the damage to compensate (# of shots vs. base Skulks, Lerks and Fades should unchanged, 1 extra pellet vs. Gorges). So Shotguns should become less effective against heavily armored targets. (thanks Schimmel!)
• Bile bomb range and splash increased a lot, damage decreased somewhat and energy cost decreased a little (trying to make Gorge less vulnerable on front lines and also more able to do at least some damage to entrenched Marines). He is NASTY now, watch out.
• Increased Hydra health from 500 to 600 and armor from 0 to 75.
• Increased Lerk Spike cost from 1.5 to 2.5. Changed distribution of Command Station health and armor so it's more resistent vs. Light damage (ie, Lerk Spikes).
• Disabled res for kills to simplify the game, remove confusion about what happens when you make a kill, reduce end-game stalemates with 1 tower and to increase the strategic aspects of the game.
• Armory no longer required to drop med packs (unnecessarily restrictive during rushes)
• Lowered bile bomb damage from 300 to 225.
• Increased repair rate for Marines repairing each others' armor from 18 to 35 (to make it less annoying and to allow Marines to sustain attacks better).
• Reverted Fade carapace armor buff from 50 to 30.
• Removed Lerk "hide" armor.
• Reduced Shotgun research time from 40 to 20 (it was 0 in NS1). Helps Marines get a foothold with early aggression.
• Increased minimum egg spawn time from 8 to 10 seconds to less that early Alien assault (now it's the same as Marines)
• Lowered infantry portal build time from 10 seconds to 7, and Armory from 15 to 12 (to try to lessen effectiveness of Skulk rush)

ns2_tram

• Moved warehouse north.
• Removed north-east Warehouse entrance.
• Opened tram tunnel between Server and Warehouse.
• Reworked connecting corridors into Warehouse.
• Fixed drifter pathing issues between Server and Control.

ns2_summit

• Reworked Flight Control and nearby vents
• Reworked Sub Access
• Added vent between Comp Lab, Sub Access and Maintenance Access

Fixes

• Fixed bug where the Gorge Bile Bomb ability used the Spit ability icon.
• Fixed bug where the Gorge Mini Cyst ability used the Hydra ability icon.
• Fixed script error if a Hive was destroyed while the Gorge that built it as Commander was a rag doll.
• Cleaned up some Client console spam when a Fade blinks.
• Fixed script error caused by a spectating player receiving points by getting a kill with a structure placed when they were not a spectator.
• Added placeholder icons for the Shell and Veil.
• Fixed bug where the game would randomly lockup while placing a Cyst.
• Drifter spawn sound effect will no longer play at world origin.
• Fixed a bug that prevented Skulks from leaping at maximum speed.
• Fixed bug where the physics representations for the Armory and Infantry Portal did not match up with the visual model.
• Weapon secondary attacks can no longer occur at the same time as primary attacks while coming out of a sprint in some cases.
• Armory buy menu will not instantly appear once construction is completed.
• Adjusted Skulk wall walking smoothing rates so that that the 3rd person model rotates more quickly to match the 1st person model (especially while jumping)
• Health and Ammo packs can now be dropped directly on top of a Marine player.
• Restored reloading of script files when they change on disk.
• Fixed Whip 'grenade whack'
• Bombard projectiles will not collide with the Whip and nearby friendly structures anymore and is created at the correct attach point.
• Alien player names for Hydra kills will no longer appear in blue text in the death message.
• Fixed a bug causing Mini Cysts placed by the Gorge to be disconnected when created even in cases where the ghost model indicated the connection was valid.
• Fixed bug causing dropped weapons to disappear too quickly if they were picked up and dropped again after initially being dropped.
• AI units cannot attack friendly players anymore unless FF is enabled.
• Fixed bug causing script error when a Cyst died due to not being connected to a Hive.
• Fixed crash when too many objects are visible.
• PhysX scene now supports mirrored geometry.
• Initial team starting locations chosen with a more random method.
• Mine will detect enemies more accurately.
• Slime effect during sprinting will not show up in thirdperson anymore.
• The ARC will prioritize other structures before Eggs and Cysts.
• Player turn poses (arms moving with feet planted on the ground) reset once the player starts moving.
• Fixed multi-threading crash when using the o_stats console command.
• The "getting ready to spawn" blue spin effect now disappears immediately upon the Infantry Portal being destroyed.
• Fixed bug where the Spore cloud would be created improperly when a Lerk was not moving.
• Fixed bug where connecting to the localhost would cause the game to go into an infinite loop.
• Fixed bug where Marines would spawn above the Infantry Portal platform.

Improvement

• Added "warp" console command to teleport to a position in space when cheats are on, "warp 0 0 0" for example.
• Improved Skulk wall walking (sticks better to surfaces, thanks matso!)
• Skulks can now leap from mid-air, ala NS1.
• The "locate" Client console command will constantly display the local player's location on the screen if "true" is given as a parameter.
• Added Mine icon for death messages (Thanks Saba!)
• Reformatted Scoreboard so more player names can fit on the screen at the same time.
• Server name is now displayed at the top of the Scoreboard.
• Improved ScenarioHandler (Thanks Matso!)

Sound

• Removed Bile Bomb hit sound when Gorge creates a structure.

Optimizations

• Optimized network fields in Structure, CloakableMixin, ScriptActor and PowerPoint (thanks Matso!)
• Reserve memory for faceSets (prevents excessive allocation)
• Reduced networked bandwidth for Camoflauge by eliminating an unnecessary network field (thanks Matso!)
• Reduced networked bandwidth for Skulks by eliminating wall walking network variables (thanks Matso!)
• Optimized Door auto-opening.
• Reduced number of cells CollisionGrid queries look through.
• Reduced network bandwidth required to send which fields of an Entity changed (uses indexing scheme when only a few fields changed and a bitmask when many changed)
• Reduced network bandwidth usage for entities that have energy.
• Reduced bandwidth for transmitting attachment points for entities by 26 bits.
• Reduced bandwidth for transmitting angles.
• Eliminated lastTimePlayerMoved networked field in Player.
• Mines require less processing time to check for nearby enemies.
• Reduced bandwidth by 20 bytes per second for each Entity sent to the client.
• Changed particle effects to only update if they were visible last frame.
• Slightly more aggressive compiler optimization options.

SDK

• Added Vector:Add method.
• Added Shared.SortEntitiesByDistance.
• Removed ProximityGrid.
• Added sphere query to CollisionGrid.
• Added EntityQueryManager (fast queries for entities within range, uses CollisionGrid)
• Exposed EntityQueryManager to Lua, started converting script to use new API.
• Added support to ObjectTagQueryManager for testing whether entity has a specific tag.
• Entities get tagged with their class name (and base class names). Tag is prefixed with 'class:'.
• Added time network variable type.
• Added "private" network fields which are only sent to the client controlling the Entity.
• Added support for networking floating point values as fixed point (specified as float (<min> to <max> by <step>)
• Added Client.GetServerName() function to return the name of the server the client is connected to.
• Added Server.GetName() function to return the name of the server.
• Added Server.GetFrameRate() function to return the current tick rate of the server.
• Added Mersenne twister Randomizer class to Lua, same API as Lua random functions but better generator.

We hope you enjoy this mega-build with us!