The latest patch for the Natural Selection 2 Beta is now available on Steam. If you have pre-ordered the game it should automatically update on Steam. If you would like to pre-order and get instant access to the beta, you can still do so here.

This week we'd like to say a big thanks to our play testers who spent lots of time helping us test and figure out how to reproduce bugs. As a result, we were able to fix some long-standing bugs like multiple weapon sound effects playing at certain times. Also thank you to the community members who submitted fixes and improvements which we've incorporated into this build!

Build 173 changelog

Changes

• Fixed clients receiving double sound/particle effects when a player is joining the server
• Fixed Skulk not playing footsteps when pressing the crouch button (Thanks Motig!
• Improved Spike shooting for Lerk so they appear to come out of the right spot and don't tend to collide with the Lerk as much (Thanks Matso!)
• Fixed crash when minimizing and restoring the game while it was loading the main menu in fullscreen mode
• Fixed crash bug when joining a new game after disconnecting from a server
• Incorporated Matso's target cache improvement, faster targeting for Hydras, Sentries, Whips, and Crags (BIG thanks to Matso for this contribution!!!)
• Better target tracking to Hydras (they try to predict where a target will be before shooting)
• Doubled Hydra health to 500
• Alien armor upgrades now give alien players more armor
• Fixed client crash due to screen effects being destroyed during rendering
• Fixed bots not moving
• Fixed bug where collision geometry would sometimes be visible after switching to a different map
• Optimized entity interpolation during lag compensation and client-side prediction
• Fixed annotations not working and made them update half a second after entering a new annotations for better feedback
• Fixed end game stats not being submitted
• Sentry spin up animation now fixed and some random variation added (Thanks Matso!)
• Fixed problem where the rifle "attack_end" view model animation would start after the player had switched to the pistol and cancel the pistol's "draw" animation (which caused problems like the marine's hand not being visible)
• Fixed bug where the Sentry firing sound effect would not stop playing
• Fixed bug where all network variables would be rolled back (and not restored) during lag compensation on the server in some cases
• Changed the rifle state to not attacking when holstered (prevents weird effects when switching weapons back to the rifle after switching to another weapon while shooting the rifle)
• Removed message about accumulating too many snapshots
• Fixed bug where a child entity could be relevant even though the parent wasn't relevant (fixes sporadic parent != NULL assert)
• Fixed jump and footstep sounds being triggered twice on the local client instead of once on the local client and once for all other players
• Fixed bug allowing player to set their name to "" (nothing), also prevented the player from setting their name to all whitespace such as " "
• Fixed an assert triggered when building another Hive
• Fixed an assert related to OnEntityChange not being called inside ScriptActor_Server.lua to handle ownership changes
• Added the ability to place additional Alien structures in the Editor
• Fixed bug where entities could have OnUpdate called on them without having OnSynchronized called on them first
• Changed parent entities to have OnSynchronized called on them before child entities
• Fixed crash on hot loading script such as "local i = 1 / ", now displays error message as expected
• Fixed Location::GetIsPointInside error messages
• Fixed issue where entities that were created in one snapshot and then destroyed in the next one would never have their data fields set
• The async Shared.GetWebpage() function now works correctly

You can always keep up to date with what we're working on for the next patch with our real-time progress tracker and please don't forget to subscribe to our new YouTube channel.