Hey everyone,

Update: NS Build 184 is now live on Steam.

The biggest changes of note here are the addition of the Shade (the "sensory chamber" replacement for the aliens), Distress Beacon for marines as well as some new network smoothness and optimizations. We're trying to balance our efforts between adding new features and improving what we have, and making weekly releases, so we're happy with this patch in that regard.

Please note that the Shade is a rough first pass and after playing with it for a few games, there are already things I want to change. So just be aware that the Shade is very early, with the design of it not even final. We don't have transparency support in Spark yet either, so it will look much more ethereal and cool later. But in the spirit of our open beta and partnership with our community, we wanted to get this in your hands for early feedback.

Also note our new auto-generated patch notes from Subversion (should make the patching process easier). We hope you enjoy it!

Update:

Build 184 changes

Features

• Added Shade structure and Cloak ability. Triggering cloak on Shade will cloak nearby players and structures. They are invisible to sentries and enemy players until they take damage or they attack (Players, Whips, Hydras), up to 15 seconds. Friendly players and structures show a stand-in particle effect when they're cloaked, as well as updated reticle text (we don't have transparency in the engine yet).
• Added Camouflage upgrade, which can be researched at the Shade. This allows aliens to stay still to go invisible.
• Created a framework for building different bot AIs
• Created a simple bot that runs back and forth for testing
• Added Distress Beacon ability to Observatory. Beacon time is 4 seconds to increase drama (it was 3 in NS1). Costs 50 energy.
• Added Shared.CollideCapsule function to script
• New marine/skulk footstep sounds
• Many new structure deploy sounds and flamethrower reload
• New sounds for alien and marine resources received, powernode fixed_powerup sound added a common marine hit event, set up the playback priorities, so that important sounds can always be heard and more polish/eq/volume tweaks
• Alien attacks volume tweaks, improved shotgun sound, pistol shorter, powernode powerup sound, nicer IP idle sound
• Added r_mt console command to disable multi-threaded rendering

Balance

• Increased egg spawn time from 9 seconds to 13 seconds to compensate for usual case of insta-spawn
• Temporarily decreased Skulk armor from 10 to 5 (11% less total HP) until frame-rates and frame-times are totally consistent. Should promote Skulkiness by keeping his speed and damage output, but also encouraging him to hide and ambush more.
• Increased egg health from 200 to 250 to compensate for slower egg spawn times

Fixes

• Fixed bug where attaching a structure to a resource or tech point would potentially rotate the resource or tech point
• Fixed bug where numerical imprecision in time values would not cause the server to think a client was speed hacking and drop their move (fixes bots stopping for no reason)
• MACs now move at their proper speeds.
• Fixed bug where building two additional hives after building a crag made crag unbuildable
• Marine damage upgrades now work for all weapons
• Alien upgrades now only work for melee weapons (bite, swipe)
• Fixed bug where entities were not interpolated smoothly on the client (caused other player's movement to appear jerky)
• Fixed bug where the Mini Cyst description was not properly looked up in the localization data (and appeared in all caps)
• Fixed tooltips for Phase Tech, Phase Gate and Advanced Armory
• Updated the bundled version of Decoda to version 1.15
• Locked/Welded Doors now block pathing
• Fixed an issue where you could accidentally build things when clicking on the mini map or other UI elements.
• Fixed bug where the Commander mode would scroll based on mouse input when the window didn't have input focus
• Fixed bug where the Commander mode would scroll based on mouse input when the window didn't have input focus
• Fixed an issue where eggs would not play their idle animation.
• Everything but door entities and world geometry are filtered out for the SporeCloud damage check, makes it impossible to hide behind something like a MAC to avoid taking spore damage (Thanks Matso!)
• Changed spore cloud to shoot like bullets so they can be shot through objects like railings (Thanks Matso!)
• Fixed issue when loading Cysts from a saved scenario that were connected to a Hive
• Changed Marine weapon melee hit effects to only happen on the server (prevents doubling up and prediction errors)

As always, if you want to get in on the beta, you can pre-order Natural Selection 2 from here.