Update 326 includes crash fixes, changes to quickplay, spectate updates, bug fixes, and new cosmetics to the Catalyst Pack. In honor of Gorgemas, everyone who has purchased the Catalyst Pack DLC will receive new gorge toxin skins for all the gorge structures. If you don’t own the Catalyst Pack, you can still purchase it and unlock all the DLC skin packs included. Remember all sales of NS2 and DLC directly affect our development budget and allow our team to continue work on NS2.

From all of us at Unknown Worlds, we wish you the happiest of holidays and Merry Gorgemas!

Check out the full changelog below to see all the goodies contained within.
Follow the NS2 development roadmap to see our plans for future updates.

Changelog

Tweaks / Improvements

• Added Toxin skins for all the Gorge structures.
  • Hydras
  • Babbler Eggs
  • Babblers
  • Clogs
  • Gorge Tunnels
• Disabled LuaJIT’s trace stitching to try and resolve in game client crashes.
• Reduced the size of the server performance fields in the move packet to lower the overall bandwidth consumption (Contributed by Steelcap)
  • This is something that will become more robust in the coming patches, further reducing server bandwidth. A requirement if we are to increase server rates.
• You can now block servers in the server browser and in the scoreboard:
  • Blocked servers are only listed at the very bottom of the server list by default. (custom sorting preferences such as sorting by ping will undo this)
  • The server entries of blocked servers are grayed out.
  • Quick play will skip blocked servers.
  • You can manage the blocked servers via the Blocked server tab in the server browser, next to the History tab.
  • Similar to adding a server to your favorites while in a server, you can utilize the scoreboard to click on the Block icon at the top of it.
• Quick Play now lists the amount of servers it skipped.
  • The reasons why a server may be skipped because they are full, passworded, rookie only, blocked or the server operator opted out the Quick Play feature.
• Quick Play will no longer connect you to a server you disconnected from in the prior 10 minutes, unless there are no other servers available.
  • Joined a server you did not like? Quickplay will try to avoid it next time.
• Improved the overhead spectator mode:
  • Added a binding legend to the bottom of the overhead spectator HUD
  • You can now focus a player by just clicking on them
  • Hovering over a player status panel at the sides of the screen will display the hitpoint values.
  • Hovering over a structure with passive abilities will display it’s radius if it has any.
  • Added health bars for non-standard dropped weapons displaying the time remaining until they expire
  • Added the name of the target location to the unit status of Phasegates and Gorge Tunnels for overhead spectators.
• Removed the 32 bit OS main menu warning.

Fixes

• Fixed that Gorge ghost placement models (such as a hydra or clog before it is placed) were color highlighted incorrectly by the default Alien Vision.
• Fixed that certain mods like NS2+ caused the main menu to not load after failing to connect to a server due to a consistency failure.
• Fixed reflections being too intense due to recent changes.
  • Reflection shininess is now back down to sane levels.
• Fixed that the ping server browser filter was applied even when it wasn’t visible at lower resolutions.
• Fixed that the Ranked server browser filter wasn’t applied to custom gamemode server. This caused some players to believe that certain custom gamemode servers are ranked while they are not.
• Fixed that the serverbrowser’s attempt-to-join-full-server dialogue mentioned reserved slots even when none were available.
• Fixed that clicking on servers in the history tab that were no longer available could cause a script error.
• Fixed small visual issues in the Tram and Eclipse menu backgrounds.
• Fixed that sometimes the user’s server Favorites were not saved correctly.
• Fixed a rare server crash related to relevancy portals that would occur when the server was struggling.

Maps

Kodiak

• Fixed stuck spot in a vent from Observation to Hangar Bay

Eclipse Menu

• Fixed flipped text

Tools

• Map Editor
  • Added selection masks for ambient_sound and reverb entities.

SDK

• Rendering Pipeline
  • Changed how the GBuffer stores normals and gloss data.  
    • Shouldn't notice any visual difference!
    • Normals now stored with only 2 components (x, y).
    • Gloss is now stored in the z component of the normals buffer, instead of the alpha channel of the spec buffer.  This allows gloss to be properly blended with decals (before, gloss would be discarded, as the alpha channel of the texture is used as the blending factor).

Known Issues

• There are still some FMOD related crashes that are being looked into, that represent roughly 20% of known crashes, that mostly occur upon launch or exit of the game.