“THIS IS ALTERRA!” First off, how amazing is it that we are at Update 300? The blood sweat and tears that have been poured into this game by so many people over the last few years is nothing short of awesome. Now we look forward to what’s to come. This update sees us making continued improvements to the server browser and an additional notification for news or updates on first open. After playing many games, reading and discussing feedback with players we’ve made some additional tweaks to newly introduced abilities and weapons. Aliens now have a new ability in Focus, so play around and see what you think. Also on the map front Derelict has seen some performance improvements, thanks Loki!

We would like to introduce the newest skin to the marine arsenal, Skull ‘n’ Crossfire. This black beauty is almost splattered with the blood of its enemies and is enshrined with the skull of the fallen to taunt those foes that dare face it next! Check it out now in the ITEM STORE. NS2 is currently running a 50% off sale through May 30th, we hope to see some new players on the battlefield. Your help to encourage and inspire teamwork will go a long way to retaining them for the long haul. Thanks for playing NS2! Tweaks / Improvements

• Main Menu:
  • Added a new changelog pop up:
    • Will show up after the client has been updated
    • Shows latest changelog
    • Allows you to give feedback on the changes
  • Tweaked the right side of the main menu slightly
  • Replaced the reload, favorite and history icons in the Server Browser to look better.
• Marines:
  • Rifle
    • Added the new fancy Skull ‘n’ Crossfire skin. http://store.steampowered.com/itemstore/4920/detail/801/
  • HMG
    • Thanks for all your feedback on the HMG!
    • Added new sounds
    • Fixed the model textures
    • Renamed it to Machine Gun (MG) because it’s not really a HMG
    • Deals 6 damage to structures, 12 to players
    • Spread is 4.5 degrees
    • Weights twice as much as the rifle
    • Magazine size is 100
    • Has maximum 5 magazines
    • Reload takes about 4.2 seconds
  • Mines
    • Increased cost to 10 pres (was 8)
    • Lowered armor to 5 (was 10)
  • Flamethrower
    • Decreased cost to 10 pres
  • Power nodes will no longer show enemies on the map unless it is under attack
• Aliens:
  • Shade Hive - Added Focus
    • Deals 50% more damage to primary attacks
    • Increases the delay between attacks by 50% (slows rate of attacks)
  • Crag Hive - Crush
    • Increased extra damage to player to 7% for each shell (21% with 3 shells)
  • Heal/Regeneration:
    • If an alien gets healed by 20% of its total health in 2 seconds every further heal is reduced to 20%
  • Hallucination Cloud:
    • Spawns now 2 skulk hallucinations if no players were targeted.
  • Revised nutrient mist cinematic to be less obscuring (Thanks IronHorse!)
  • Cysts now have a unique nutrient mist cinematic (Thanks IronHorse!)
  • Revised mucous membrane cinematic to be less obscuring (Thanks IronHorse!)
  • Rupture parasite time reduced to 10 seconds ( was 44 seconds )
  • Gorge Build Menu:
    • Swapped position of Webs and Babbler Egg. Webs are now in slot 3
  • Babblers now cling to their owner when they hatch from their egg
• Other:
  • Increased the damage number animation speed
  • Increased the health bars animation speed
  • Disabled the consistency check for local servers
  • Removed heavy damage effects
  • The local player gets highlighted in the scoreboard

Fixes

• Fixed that the reserved slot count could be negative ending up with server having more slots in the server browser than they really have
• Fixed that the marine weapon icons were not displayed correctly in spectator view
• Fixed that the health bars were wrongly colored in spectator
• The give cheat command will no longer cause script errors with invalid command arguments
• Fixed that the Onos stomp sound repeated itself in spectator view
• Fixed that the Alien Commander did not re-cyst to ressource points correctly
• Fixed that in case a server reported a negative amount of reserved slots the server browser displayed more slots than available.
• Fixed that the Alien Vision wasn’t working on Linux (thanks rkfg)

Translations

• Swedish translations are at 88%, just a little more love!

SDK

• Added Shared.GetAnimationLength() callback. Accepts model name (with filepath) and animation name. Returns length of time for an animation (as a float).
• Added Client.GetClientUpdated which returns true if the client got updated before the last client start, otherwise it returns false.

Maps

• Derelict 
  • Improved FPS inside Nursery (specifically when entering from flooded biosphere) and Turbines.
  • Several duplicated lights have been removed in Turbines.
  • Added additional occlusion geometry around Heat Xfer and Geothermal.