Here's one more maintenance/fix patch before we get back to work on the bigger "Gorilla". This fixes some new crashes and improves balance over 191.

Features

• Added map cycling on the server (now you can run ns2_tram!). Use mapcycle.txt file to set up.
• Added Left 4 Dead style animated screen hints to make it more clear when marines should build structures, build power nodes, or guard power nodes.
• Hitting marines with Gorge spit will obscure their view.

Balance

• Removed change in alien armor effectiveness with # of hives. This was supposed to work like NS1, but a recent meant that aliens got _weaker_ with more hives! Now it's gone completely.
• Added 2 points of "hide" armor to Lerks (every attack does 2 less damage, good vs. groups).
• Added a very small delay between a mine being armed and exploding (*BEEP* ... BOOM!!!).
• Increased Fade carapace armor from 30 to 50.
• Increased Gorge bile bomb damage from 200 to 300 and splash radius from 5 meters to 8 meters.
• Increased Mature Whip health/armor from 900/150 to 1,050/175.
• Increased Skulk carapace armor from 15 to 20.
• Increased mine purchase cost from 10 to 15.
• Increased minimum spawn time for eggs from 6 to 8, to try to allow marines to counter-rush after a failed attack (also to compensate for recent egg bug fix).
• Lowered Gorge carapace armor from 60 to 50.
• Lowered Robotics Factory build time from 30 to 25 to be less annoying and closer to other structures.
• When players and structures are on fire, they recover energy at 25% normal rate (was 10% rate, which was very rough for Fade).
• Personal resources have now a limit of 100 per player. Any overflow will be split amongst the other players on the team.
• Whip bombs will not bounce off world geometry anymore.
• Changed corrode damage to deal only a small amount to players armor instead of full damage.

Fixes

• A player will no longer be distress beaconed if they are close enough to the command station being beaconed to already.
• Death messages for Players or Structures killed by Mines that were destroyed by other Mines will now display correctly.
• Don't invoke collision callback if one of the objects has been destroyed.
• Fixed bug where a client would not properly go back to the main menu when there was an error during connection (e.g. the client doesn't have the map).
• Fixed bug where aliens used hive1 armor for 3+ hives and hive3 armor for 1 hive...(egads - thanks Jaweese!).
• Fixed bug where clients would not be returned to the main menu if they failed to authenticate.
• Fixed bug where grenades would explode too early depending on your ping time (OnCreate is now called in the world time stream instead of the lag compensated time stream).
• Fixed bug where the game would not display the reason for being disconnect from a server when it returned to the main menu.
• Fixed crash in PhysX on level change (caused by creating too many materials).
• Fixed crash when too many reliable commands were sent at the same time.
• Fixed packet format errors when too many mines explode simultaneously.
• Fixed players not showing up in a server when viewed on Steam Friends.
• Fixed prediction errors when using the speed command.
• Fixed script error caused by giving a rally order to an unbuilt Hive.
• Game freeze when placing cysts.
• Mines detonate each other with some randomness now, for aesthetic effect(thanks Mats!).
• Multiple Whips or ARCs can now be given a root/unroot or deploy/undeploy command.
• No longer ignore damage types when calculating # of health points per point of alien armor.
• Physics transform changes are detected even if they happen in a sub-step.
• The Marine will only be slowed on landing if they jumped first (going down stairs will not artificially slow a player).
• The sound effect that plays when distress beacon is finished will only trigger if at least 1 player was successfully beaconed.
• Updated Lerk weapon spike and spore tooltips.
• Viewer sometimes starts with black screen.
• Whip bombs will now correctly deal damage to players (small amount and armor only).
• Whips will properly attack grenades again.
• Reduced network usage for updating infestation (thanks matso!).
• reserve Fade velocity when coming out of blink.
• Improved spit effect to look less 'spritey'.
• Don't create new material instance when the default material matches the friction/restitution settings (physics).

Sound

• Added private 2D sound effect for when a player is distress beaconed to ensure they always hear this effect.
• Better alien vision sounds.
• Better commander scan sound.
• Better powernode destroyed sound.
• Fixed ARC fire sound.
• Hooked up Mine sounds: Drop, Warmup, Explode.
• Hooked up new Alien tooltip sound effect.
• Hooked up private 2D sound for when a player teleports through the Phase Gate (so they hear this effect better).

SDK

• Added support for the Lua IO library (file names use special prefixes "game://", "user://", "temp://", and "cache://" to determine where they are located in the file system).
• Changed console command for collision rep visualization to 'collision'.
• Cull physics/collision debug drawing to view frustum.
• PhysX scene visualization (using the 'physics' console command).
• Table.contains will now return the key of the element when found.

OK, NOW it's Gorilla time...