A happy new year to all of you out there! I’ll bet some of you thought we hit the snooze button around the holidays and never woke up, but no! We’ve been tinkering in the shadows and working on some fun new stuff to show you. First off, we’re finally finishing up on our changes to NS2 training and bringing you the new Alien Commander tutorial. As per usual, BeigeAlert has put a lot of love and once again, yes, even an easter egg into this new training scenario. Special shout out to all our contributors in tutorial-committee for their input and advice. We decided to also make some slight changes to a couple gameplay features to continue and round out some of our changes made during the last year. The patch is filled with lots of little bug fixes and updated features such as; a new updated machine gun texture, a refactored badge system allowing us to have better and quicker control over distribution of badges and some improvements to cyst placement. Lastly, and to the future… I am happy to announce that while work is still being done to test stability, NS2 is now being beta tested in 64-bit! FSFOD and others on the team have been hard at work upgrading lots of code and plugins to allow this to happen and so far our testing is proving great. Why do I mention this now? Well, with the update we will be able to open up a variety of new features and abilities within the game and engine that were a bottleneck in 32-bit, memory consumption being primary concern. Also we will be working reaching out to some of our community server ops to help us run public tests on the 64-bit platform to see what gains or stability or problems arise. So look for more information about 64-bit in future updates. We at Unknown Worlds would like to thank the community for its continued passion and dedication to NS2! -Dillon “WasabiOne”

Gameplay

• Lerk
• Increased base health points to 150 (from 125)
• Lowered the biomass health bonus to 2 (from 3)

• This change makes the Lerk slightly more durable in early engagements.

• Machine Gun (MG)
• Decreased weight to 0.21 (150% of the Grenade Launcher) from 0.26

• This change helps players with the MG to aim more quickly in combat and mobility.

• Mucous Cloud (Drifter Ability)
• Increased the amount of extra health point mucous grants to 20% (from 15%) of the target’s base hp.

• This change makes mucous cloud more viable compared to the hallucination cloud which generates hallucinations with 32% of the target’s base hp.

Tweaks / Improvements

• Replaced the Machine Gun texture with a higher quality version.
• Added new Alien Commander tutorial
• Learn the basics of Alien Commanding.
• Includes some hidden achievements and easter eggs.
• Added new badges (steam items) for the competitive ensl league:
• Added a badge for the winner of the 10th season
• Added badges for the world championship 2014 finalists
• Added badges for the upcoming newcomer tournament
• Refactored the badge API:
• API is now handling the badge enum correctly
• Supports multiple columns for each badge which may be user specific
• Adds support for Steam Item based badges
• Improved Cyst placement routines to ensure they are more consistently and evenly placed along paths.
• Improved Cyst placement to be accurate per mouse cursor position
• Optimized the update routine of clogs, webs and alien weapons (Thanks Katzenfleisch).

Fixes

• Fixed that Whips kept attacking invalid targets instead of searching for new targets.
• Fixed that parasite was not correctly applied onto players logging out of the command chair.
• Fixed that the ghost model for certain commander drops wasn't matched up with where it actually is when spawned (eg hives were sunk half way into the tech point instead of hovering on top of them).
• Fixed that mines had the wrong ghost model when commander was dropping them.
• Fixed that the evolution chamber wasn’t selectable sometimes due to relevancy issues.
• Fixed slerp calculations which would result in player models twitching rapidly (Thanks Nin).
• Fixed that the Exo flashlight was facing towards the floor (Thanks Nin).
• Fixed that the “purchase” sound of the marine buy menu didn’t play correctly (Thanks Brute).

Maps

• Refinery
• Fixed two stuck spots in Ready room for Winter seasonal theme.
• Fixed non-seasonal stuck spot in Lava Falls.
• Fixed reflections maps incorrectly using Biodome map.
• Mineshaft
• Fixed stuck spot in ready room for Winter seasonal theme.
• Kodiak
• Fixed several stuck spots in ready room for Winter seasonal theme.
• Caged
• Fixed Fall seasonal in-game props showing for other seasons in Shipping Tunnels.
• Tram
• Fixed Fall seasonal prop showing for other seasons.
• Summit
• Fixed missing collision on some props near Sub Access.
• Fixed flickering texture in Atrium.
• Fixed missing collision on glass pane in Flight Control.

SDK

• Fixed the perfanalyzer.py to work with the latest plog format version.
• Fixed that the Entity.AddTimedCallback early parameter had no effect on callback behavior.