Since the holidays we’ve seen an influx of both new and old players coming back to NS2. We continue to receive lot of positive feedback to many of the changes we’ve made over the last year. With this update we’re focused on some maintenance but also continuing to improve smaller features in the game to enhance the player experience. Beyond update 314 we’re looking at ways to help players quickly find and play games. We’ve noticed more and more people at peak times around the globe are idling in the server browser, trying to join the populated servers. This long wait can cause them to quit; an improvement is clearly needed. To that end, we’ve been working on ideas on how to better seed servers with these idling players and have been making good progress on a potential match-making system. Keep your eyes peeled for more info on that soon! Lastly, I am happy to announce that we will begin public testing of our 64-bit server sometime in the next week. Our amazing community of server operators seem to be very excited to get their hands on this BETA server and we are just as thrilled. We hope that the 64-bit client beta will be coming to you all soon as well. The move to 64-bit will open up a lot more opportunities to our development team, such as better utilization of more modern hardware and adding more content to the game. Sadly, we’ve reached the limits of what 32-bit allows the game to do. Many other games are facing the same transition; you may have noticed similar announcements from other studios recently on this topic as well. We’re always looking for ways to build our community of players, modders, operators and playtesters. Without you, we wouldn’t be here. We have the excitement and desire to keep moving forward and hope that you will join us in the journey!

Gameplay

• Improved Babblers (Contributed by twiliteblue!)
• They are more likely to attack nearby enemies now.
• They cloak and uncloak now properly.
• Improved attack distance calculations which makes them more effective against stationary targets
• Power surge now also surges powered structures, so you can cast it before the power goes off.

Tweaks / Improvements

• Added the “All” tab back to the Server Browser and introduced a new server ranking system for the default sorting:
  • The rating is trying to find the best server for you by player count, skill, latency, performance. It will also prefer your favorite servers and servers with steam friends playing on them. (Thanks moultano!)
  • Also made the game mode tabs visually noticeable.
• Added a dedicated label for the number of players that are actively searching for a server to the server browser.
• Improved Play Now:
  • Uses the new server rating as well for better search results
  • Validates servers now before joining them so it doesn’t pick full servers anymore
  • It will ignore servers you have or tried to connect to in the last 10 minutes.
  • Fixed some smaller bugs with querying the server list.
• Re-wrote a large part of how clogs work, so there should no longer be any jittery movement or the dreaded "phantom" clogs.
• Gorge tunnels will now "eat" clogs to prevent entrances from being blocked.
• Local clients can now execute all admin (sv_*) commands at a listen servers without having to set up the serveradmin.json.
• Added an option to add bots (will add 12 bots incl. commanders) to the “Create Server” interface. Bots still cause serious performance issues, especially on listen servers! Use them at your own risk! We will try to optimize them with the upcoming updates.
• Improved the sleep behavior of the ns2 threads for Windows OS to resolve scheduling issues.
• Optimized the TechTree class to minimize its functions execute times.
• Added routine in Hive to retroactively update players levels to correct for XP update bugs (does not impact Skill)
• Improved how weapon pickups work. The weapon you are looking at should now be the weapon you pick up, as well as the weapon that appears in the popup.
• Added the March Mod Madness badges to the game.
• The player’s badges are now displayed below the player’s hp bar in-game in pre-game only and will not be shown while a round is played. (Thanks Brute!)
• Added tooltips with the badge names to the badge selection menu. (Contributed by Keats!)
• Removed the Play Now button at the Training menu.
• The game is no longer reset when switching between warmup and pregame state.

Fixes

• Fixed a minor rendering anomaly which caused specular-lights beneath a surface to still somehow appear to be reflected by that surface.
• Fixed that the ensl.org newcomer tournament badges did not unlock properly.
• Fixed a bug that would make the build tool flicker on and off rapidly when building a new power node in most cases.
• Fixed a bug where sometimes clogs would not be able to be destroyed by the gorge who placed them, at least not until the gorge exited and re-entered relevancy range.
• Fixed a bug where sometimes a gorge would attempt to consume a hydra, but instead the hydra would continue to live, but would no longer be consumable.
• Fixed a bug where the holographic marine being "printed" (respawned) in an infantry portal might not accurately reflect the actual spawn progress.
• Fixed that Shifts could not echo themselves (was hotfixed via extension).
• Fixed bug in Hive that prevented new players from earning new levels (no effect on Skill calculations)
• Fixed bug in Hive that prevented players above level 100 from earning experience (no effect on Skill calculations)
• Fixed bug where gorges could place gorge structures and bile bomb from inside a clog.
• Fixed the final fade-out in tutorials 1 and 2 to not flicker off before disconnecting.
• Fixed many bugs in the alien commander tutorial, including bots blocking structure placement, or the gorge getting stuck under the floor in crew quarters.
• Fixed a bug that would prevent the "Hold E to Digest" popup from appearing with clogs.
• Fixed that the level progression in the main menu didn’t update properly.
• Fixed a bug that allowed players to reach very high speed with the Exosuit via “bunny hopping”
• Fixed that the warmup structures spawned multiple times.
• Fixed that Onos hallucination interrupted a marine from firing his weapon when using Gore. (Contributed by twiliteblue!)
• Fixed a script error that occurred when dead players directly joined the spectators and a round ended afterwards (Contributed by Brute!)
• Fixed that you could load/inject code via the game’s css files without being detected by the default consistency check.
• Fixed some minor style issues of the server browser.

Maps

Refinery (Contributed by Samus!).

• Fixed stuck spot in the vent of Heat Sink going into Containment
• Fixed spot in Transit where some structures could be placed inside map geometry.
• Fixed spot in Transit where geo/decal z-fighting occurred.

Tram

• Fixed some seasonal geometry not being assigned to correct seasonal group as a result showed when not in Fall season setting

SDK

• AddFieldWatcher can now be used in Predict VM. NOTE: This should be used very conservatively, and keep in mind it can fire more than once due to how prediction works. I recommend only using this for cases where a predict world network field update requires further action (e.g. an update to "modelIndex" should be accompanied by a physics update to ensure the model is actually changed). -- Beige
• Fixed a bug (clog digest bug above) that would prevent an entity from being properly picked up by the GetEntitiesInRange function, or any of its variants.
• Added a second “hidden” parameter to the map command. So “map hidden” will now start a hidden listen server that works offline. Perfect to test mods locally.
• Commander.Logout now returns the new player entity (Contributed by Las!)