It's been awhile since the last news update, but that's only because there's so much happening in the world of NS. One big development is that Flayra finally moved to beautiful city of San Francisco, in order to get Unknown Worlds off the ground. NS is getting help from new team members (selected from the NS community) to continue improving NS while Flayra and others start working on the next game in the NS universe. We want NS to continue to be actively developed while we take the time we need to build a company and the next game, and in order for that to happen, we just need more people. With that, it's my pleasure to announce the following additions to the NS team:

Spencer "Voogru" MacDonald - Known from his NS mods and his community site, Spencer has been hacking Half-life and NS for years. Spencer will be fixing bugs and adding features.

Tom "ElvenThief" Grim - Known as "E-Th33ph" in the community, Tom is an experienced NS player, avid linux fan and IRC slave. Tom will be also be working on NS development along with Spencer.

Kanwei "#cri.ogenics" Li - Kanwei is another long-standing NS community member, and while still in highschool, has already begun professional web programming. His work can be seen at Portal Iraq, Newton Community Education and Newton North High School. He is also the author and maintainer of the NS damage simulator. Kanwei will be adding features to the main NS web site, as well as reworking the compete site for organizing competitive play.

If you see these guys online, please congratulate them on their new responsibilities, and treat them especially nicely (we all want them to be as productive as possible...).

In patch news, the team is hard at work on beta 5. We expect to have the ‘hitbox’ bug fixed (related to slot that player inhabited on server), along with resource tower/collision improvements, HLTV improvements and lots more. This patch will be mostly bug fixes, and we expect to release it Friday, July 23rd, in time for testing before the CPL. We are also hoping to have NS released officially on Steam (under “My Games” instead of “Third Party Games”) shortly thereafter. After NS is released on Steam, and some of the more pressing issues are taken care of, we’ll get back to adding new features to the game.

ClanBase NS Cup is drawing to a close! That's right, the Final is upon us after 46 teams battled it out to determine Europe's finest NS team two remain: bP from the UK and RaB from France. The game date, HLTV and shoutcast details will be announced very soon on the CupPage and live updates, as ever, will be brought to you at #naturalselection on QuakeNET (note that the official NS IRC channel is still #naturalselection on GamesNET).

Speaking of the CPL, we are expecting to have a big showing of NS there in the B.Y.O.C. at the end of this month! Flayra will be attending, and possibly giving a small seminar on lessons learned in NS and the future direction of the game and universe. He’ll be watching all the teams in action, and will be on-hand for questions and socializing. Just look for the guy carrying the laptop with the Fade on the back...