Check out the fresh digs! UnknownWorlds.com, and NS2’s home, have a new look! Read more about that here. Now, Build 238 is almost here!

Identifying NS2 versions by Build number has benefits and drawbacks. On the one hand, it’s fun to know that this is going to be the 238th version of NS2 (The initial builds being protoplasmic versions of the Source Development Kit). On the other hand, how many versions have there been since launch? To find out, we need high-order mathematics. The launch build was 227, so 238-227, carry the four… This is the 11th build since launch!

Build 238 is a ‘maintenance’ style build. You know when the plumber comes around, and does ‘maintenance’ on your toilet? …

Social media is a revolution for small game developers. Chatting on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Reddit and the Steam Group allows us to talk to you all directly. We don’t have to worry about whether a third party is pushing information to you. If you want to hear from us, you can.

The conversation is not one sided. Every comment, every @NS2 Tweet, every message that you post to our social media feeds gets read. Often, it is just a cursory glance down the list of comments on a photo posted to Facebook. But they are read nonetheless, and that is important. Taken together, we can use your responses on social media to guage the ‘feel’ out there …

Build 236 was full of great improvements. One of them was an occasional client-side crash on map load. We received your feedback, and apparently you did not like this feature.

After much deliberation, we decided to reluctantly remove the crash. Build 237 is now out, and fixes this problem. It is otherwise identical to 236, and therefore you can’t have a changelog. We refuse. It is one line long and too self-conscious to be posted.

Watch out for a big changelog for Build 238!…

Build 236 is out in the wild! Over the next few hours, official and community servers will roll over to the new, shinier version of the game. It is a bit of a monstor, with very significant changes. Most notably, you will experience better hit detection against skulks on walls. In previous builds, Skulk hit-box rotation while on non-horizontal surfaces has been somewhat erroneous. Here is a short video showing you some Build 236 stuff (please excuse Hugh’s borked microphone):

Since their introduction, the intensity of atmospheric effects on marine flashlights has been a point of strong debate. We understand they were too bright, and they have been significantly toned down in 236, making it easier to see through your …

Build 236 is a real doozy. It is chock full of fixes, changes and generally agreeable content. We plan to let it loose next week, probably around Wednesday or Thursday. Before we do that, we want to be sure that it isn’t going to be a crash-prone bug-addled mess. Not that there are ever bugs in NS2, but occasionally things (We like to call them ‘features’) slip through internal playtesting.

To that end, a beta version of 236 is now on Steam. You can access it by right click on Natural Selection 2 in your Steam library, selecting ‘Properties’ > ‘Betas’ > ‘Patch Beta Release Branch.’ See the image below:

We do not recommend doing this if you want to …

A new year resolution here at UWE is to blog more often, and about more varied topics. Often, these posts will not have direct relevance to NS2. But they will all give you an insight into the minds of the people working on NS2, and should be interesting to boot! NS2 related posts will continue as they always have. Starting us off this week is Brian ‘Murphy’ Cronin, Lead Programmer and Number One Brian:

Defense

When thinking about defense, the castle instantly comes to mind. A self contained city able to withstand attack for months at a time. However, as demonstrated in the most famous battle of all time, Helm’s Deep from Lord of the Rings, even the strongest castle …

What a holiday. After spending some quality vacation time at the top of the Steam sales charts, NS2 ready for the new year. There are tens of thousands of new players fragging away amongst the battle-scarred veterans of old.

UWE is back in the office after a break. Our primary objective is to keep making the game better for all of you, whether you have just started playing NS2 or have been with us since the stormy days of the Alpha.

To do that, we need your help. Many developers have large, dedicated ‘quality assurance’ teams. These teams are paid to find out just how badly the programmers, artists, game designers, and micro-transaction lovers have buggered everything up.

At Unknown …

We believe one of the most important things for us to do is take feedback from players constantly. This feedback decides which features, fixes, and balance changes should go into the next version of the game we release.

This cycle of getting feedback and making a new release is the core "loop" that our company lives and dies by. The better we can reflect the spoken and unspoken needs of our players, the better the game gets, and our income improves. This is especially important in our new knowledge economy, one where traditional marketing isn’t as important as organic word-of-mouth spread.

So this player input is incredibly important to us and something we spend significant time working with, exposing …

There is nothing Brian like doing more than putting out patches. Drawing together all the art and code, getting through playtests, pushing the build to Valve, it really brings joy to his bearded heart.

He loves it so much, that there has to be a very good reason to ‘hotfix’ something. ‘Hotfixing’ is not easy, and is very disruptive to the normal cycle of updating the game. But today we decided to do it, to fix a rather large noclip hole in Tram.

We can’t have naughty Gorges sitting outside maps during the holiday seaon, after all. But wait! There’ more…

Head to the LaunchPad inside your Natural Selection 2 directory, and you will find a rather large present. All …