We're catching our breath after the Engine Test release last Friday. We're very happy that it seemed to be well-received and that all of you are enjoying an early look at the technology and art style in the game. So far we've had over 7,000 people run the engine test which is the majority of our pre-orderers!

Community member rsd stole our thunder with today's update so I guess we'll have to try something else! Max and Kurt are hard at work addressing issues that you've reported. They're also bringing the editor up to speed (it is currently using our old slower rendering pipeline and it will get much faster shortly).

We are excited to see you guys already modding the game, adding things like sprinting, crouching, deathmatch, etc (we've developed a lot of this as well, although we didn't feel it was ready for release yet). We love this first NS2 "frag" video too:

We've been hearing about how much you like the NS2 music at the main menu. The musician is David John, whom we've been collaborating with for a few years now. To make sure the music doesn't interfere with the game, we're using intermittent musical "stingers" in-game. However, we really wanted to create a full standalone soundtrack as well, so we're working on that and planning to release that for sale when it's done. In the meantime, here's the main menu audio track in .mp3 for you to listen to or download:

Finally, I'm refactoring our NS2 game script to make sure we can release bits of if to you guys without releasing the whole game (before it's ready). This will also allow us to release updates more easily without breaking your mods (something we are particular sensitive to!). We're also making a small game mode that is both useful for us in building our mod infrastructure and should prove entertaining to many of you (especially if you've been around since the original NSTR!).