Hello NSPlayers!

After far too long, the Natural Selection and Unknown Worlds sites are finally ready for wider testing. I never would've believed it if someone told me how long it was going to take, but it was a huge amount of work.

We've been testing it with the Constellation members for a couple weeks and everything seems to be working well, so now we're ready to open it up to a wider audience. Namely, you.

This e-mail is going out to everyone who has signed up on the NS forums since the dawn of time (since we opened in the forums in 2002). As a treasured member of the NS community, we'd like to get your feedback before going live to the public.

To check out the site, go to the following URL (the site will not be on port 90 when we release to the public of course):

http://www.unknownworlds.com/ns

It will then ask you for a login and password. Enter the following:

login: SiteTest password: T4keTw0

Note, do not enter your forum handle and password, use the above! Once that happens, you can login to the site normally and get back to your precious forums. :) Please note that if we have security or technical problems, we may very well end up changing the password on the site again to prevent access while we fix the problem. Just keep trying and the site you'll be back in soon (or we'll send another message to this list). We're going to do whatever is needed to get this site back to the public as soon as possible. Also, if we have problems some posts made during this test period could be lost. So if you decide to use this time to post your dissertation proving why NS needs a "Scorpian that hovar swithout flapping", you may want to save it on your computer, just in case.

A short time after we make the site public, we plan on announcing the first juicy details of the next NS game, which will use the Half-life II engine and will be released for sale on Steam.

Special thanks to the legions of coders and QA folks we've had working on this site at one time or another, especially Karl "XP-Cagey" Patrick , Harry "puzl" Walsh and Felipe "Zoc" Silveira. We would've remained forever hacked without you.

Please report any bugs you find to Zoc or post a thread in the Bug Reports forum. Finally, you should take a moment to make sure your profile is up to date, especially your e-mail address. We will never spam you and plan on using these mailing lists whenever we have big news (which should be a lot more often now!).

Welcome back!