Today we have a treat for you. New first person animations have arrived for all the core pieces of a Marine’s basic kit: Rifle, Pistol, and Axe! Every single animation has been rebuilt completely from scratch and ran through a new modernized pipeline to improve the weight and feel of the weapon handling and movement in NS2. In addition, while updating the animations, we have also fixed many issues in the animation graphs that control which animations play and how they blend together. 

For many, playing the game with new animations may feel like a bit of a shock considering we’ve all been used to the same animations for upwards of five years; but give it a chance and I …

We recently asked Moultano if he could write up something to explain how the improvements to the skill learning formula that Hive 2 will use will work. It seemed too interesting to not post… so here it is.

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Imagine a mountain covered by fog. You are lost somewhere on that mountain, and you are trying to get to the top. When you look around at your surroundings, you can only see a few feet around you. You look around, guess which direction is going most steeply uphill, and set off in that direction. While you are walking, the landscape is too confusing to figure out whether you are still going uphill or not, so you walk for a fixed …

Many of you have wondered what goes on behind the scenes, and what our long term plans are. In the earlier phases of this project we only had a 3 month contract and so we didn’t have as much freedom to “think big”. Now we are unchained. We have been given the green light to continue developing NS2 and it looks like we will be able to do so for at least another 6-9 months.

In the past the goals we communicated were more focused on discrete metrics: player retention, number of concurrents, and the number of copies sold. But those are just tools to measure our progress. Our aim for NS2 has always been larger than what those metrics …